
What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like? - benbreen
https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-did-17th-century-food-taste-like.html
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elboru
I've noticed food evolves in a particular way when it arrives to a new
country. It's logical that food needs to be adapted to the country taste in
order to get popular, but what it intrigues me is that it usually becomes more
"complex", a lot of new ingredients are added, and the original refinement is
missed.

A good example is pizza, I'm from Mexico, so I was get used to pizzas with a
lot of different ingredients and a specific shape:
[https://tinyurl.com/y7wd7hl6](https://tinyurl.com/y7wd7hl6)

So I was really excited to taste the real stuff in Italy and then I got
shocked when I noticed how simple one of the most popular is:
[https://tinyurl.com/nqcdhah](https://tinyurl.com/nqcdhah)

Something similar happened to onigiri.

What I know: [https://tinyurl.com/yanlww6b](https://tinyurl.com/yanlww6b)
Original: [https://tinyurl.com/yaaw7f9k](https://tinyurl.com/yaaw7f9k)

And it seems like this is not something particular to Mexico, it happens the
other way around too:

Original taco: [https://tinyurl.com/yb8456mf](https://tinyurl.com/yb8456mf)
American taco: [https://tinyurl.com/y8vsuaxs](https://tinyurl.com/y8vsuaxs)

Original burrito: [https://tinyurl.com/ycknpbyb](https://tinyurl.com/ycknpbyb)
American burrito:[https://tinyurl.com/yb84p8lq](https://tinyurl.com/yb84p8lq)

~~~
rockostrich
I think this just applies to the commercialized versions of those foods in the
foreign countries. The pizza you linked to from Mexico looks like something
you would get from any fast food pizza place in America and the Italian one
looks like a margherita slice from any half decent pizza place in NYC. Same
goes for the tacos. The "American" one just looks like something you get from
Taco Bell while the "Original" looks like something I would get from a local
taco truck.

The burrito is an interesting case. I do think that's evolved a bit in America
to the point where everyone is copying Chipotle and Qdoba and trying to make
the biggest burritos.

~~~
pavement
In many parts of the United States, well into the nineties, there were no Taco
Bell tacos. I didn't get to try Taco Bell until 1995.

Growing up, Burritos were these frozen bean-paste wraps, with "meat" included
sometimes, that you got from the super market and microwaved in multiple
passes, until years later when Taco Bell appeared. Then after The Year 2000,
some truly incredible Big Burrito shacks started popping up, with these
gigantic, incredible 1.5 pound burritos, right before Chipotle began its
massive expansion.

Otherwise, there were some rare Spanish restaurant chains like _Meson, Olé!_
(still around), which were sit down affairs, with what seemed like (nearly
extravagant) gourmet foreign cuisine, when stood next to the frozen burritos.
Their freebie table nachos were these amazing and decadent snacks as a kid.

Pizza looked like neither, and gambling on pizza beyond the New York tri-state
area was certainly taking a chance. I remember eating a pizza in Pennsylvania
in the late 80's on one occasion, and it was hard/crunchy, almost stale-ish,
cardboard-style flatbread, with "sauce" and "cheese" on top. That's the most
memorable incident, but the prevailing wisdom was true: don't get Pizza
outside of New York. Plain cheese brick oven pizza comes close to what people
view(ed) as New York style pizza, even if you might find lots of the
"original" example in NYC. Otherwise, mass produced Pizza Hut or Little
Ceaser's were the only two consistent regional options for a long time, and
while edible, each was a variation of "pizza" and not Pizza.

~~~
curtis
> _... with these massive, incredible 1.5 pound burritos..._

This is the "Mission-style Burrito"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_burrito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_burrito)).
I first encountered them in San Francisco in 1997, where I found them to be
quite a novelty, even though I was coming from Texas and had a more than
passing familiarity with burritos.

Chipotle has now popularized them nation-wide, of course.

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d13
"as time went by, a dish tended to become sweeter, spicer, and more
complicated."

Feature creep!

~~~
zero_one_one
The original requirements were for bread and meat. With an optional drink of
water if there was time and it came in under budget.

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hprotagonist
one of the truly frustrating things about renaissance and medieval recipes is
that they are shorthand notes, not detailed instructions. Think inferring
documentation from commit messages, basically.

i found a 15th century recipe for a particular kind of soup that started “make
soup as normal;in addition add ...”

~~~
goodcanadian
You don't have to go back to the middle ages for that. I have a recipe book
with recipes from my grandmother and her contemporaries which are often just
lists of ingredients. Knowledge of how to assemble them is assumed. Even some
of the ingredients already aren't what you think. "Sour cream," for example,
is naturally soured (spoiled) cream, not the stuff we now buy in the grocery
store.

~~~
Mikeb85
Just a little correction, naturally soured cream isn't spoiled but is
fermented by lactic acid bacteria that occur naturally in raw milk. To sour
pasteurized cream you don't let it spoil, but introduce the right kind of
bacteria.

~~~
goodcanadian
Yes, I know you are correct. I choose the word "spoiled" as a shorthand for
the fermentation process. It is "spoiled" in the same sense that yoghurt and
cheese are "spoiled" milk. Not entirely accurate, but perhaps more descriptive
to those who don't know what it is.

In retrospect, I should have used "fermented" rather than "spoiled."

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billconan
this is an interesting youtube channel related to this

[https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson/videos)

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
A 17th century whisk is a bunch of small sticks :).

~~~
hanoz
Like animal whiskers still look.

~~~
russellbeattie
Huh... I just assumed "whisk" was an onomatopoeia.
_whiskwhiskwhiskwhiskwhiskwhiskwhisk_...

~~~
hanoz
You assumed right. The cat's whiskers were named after the _whiskwhiskwhisk_
whiskers.

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Mikeb85
Was hoping for a little more concrete research or recipes. I work in the food
industry and history is one of my favourite topics as well. My grandmother was
Ukrainian and lived on a farm, and her cooking was based 100% on ingredients
that came from very close to their farm, as well as processed in a non-
industrial setting (cabbage fermented in a barrel, natural sour cream, farm
animals that were killed behind the barn, etc...). The taste was certainly
different than industrial foods. Now going back in time there were no gas or
electric ovens, people mainly cooked on wood fired hearths, which would have
given a different flavour. Not to mention lack of refrigeration would mean
more salted and cured meats and less fresh meat. It is certainly an
interesting exercise to try to recreate old tastes, but not really possible.
I'd guess we can come close though.

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jngreenlee
If you like this, I can't recommend the BBC's "Supersizers" enough. The pair
is super funny as they re-create and re-eat historical foods.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supersizers..](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supersizers..).

More Claret!

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fragsworth
The author unfortunately concludes at the bottom that it's impossible to know
what the foods really tasted like:

> These early modern foods are culinary false friends. They seem like they'd
> be the same as our familiar correlates. But we can't be sure that they
> tasted the same.

> Like so much in history, they're so close, yet just out of reach.

There are several reasons, probably the most important being that the
cultivars of plants they used at the time were so different that we can't know
what they tasted like. Heavy selection and breeding over the course of 500
years changes a lot.

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vram22
Apropos: Wikipedia has articles on topics like Ancient Roman Cuisine, Ancient
Israelite cuisine, etc.

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jwilk
What do they mean by "squash" (on the map)?

~~~
benbreen
The cucurbita genus of vegetables:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita)

~~~
jwilk
Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita)

