This is a thread about discussing historical foods, food that made an impact on history, and their preperation
Long-distance sailing was crippled by Scurvy which had the potential to kill hundreds of crew members.
In comes Captain James Cook testing out solutions and among them Sauerkraut which was found to help prevent Scurvy due to the high amount of Vitamin-C in it, along side it's cheap price (Cabbages and brine were much cheaper than citrus fruits) and long storage time it aided in the survival of many sailors.
What other historically significant food can you think of?
Let me get a few obvious ones out of the way:
> Yeast bread
> Dried foods
> Cured meats
> Vinegar/Pickled foods
> Wine/Beer
> Olive oil
bump
>>1348873
Sugar. The crude oil of the 1700's.
>>1348873
Tea.
Not related to the food itself but:
>Invented airtight conservation
>Started from champagne bottle to glass container to tin cans.
>Food was praised as being fresh even better in some cases
>Publish the method of preservation in a cookbook WITHOUT patenting it
>All this before Pasteurization and Sterilization was a thing.
Nicolas Appert was his name in case you're wondering.
According to a UN report insects could help plug the looming protein gap in our diet, given that by 2050 a world population of 9 billion will require food production to increase by 70%(a cricket is 70% protein by weight and can be ground into protein-rich flours)
>>1349650
Or you could just stop being a vegan faggot and eat some meat.
>>1349659
Meat is incredibly resource intensive.
And this is from someone who had beef for dinner, bacon for breakfast and chicken for lunch.
![90bd522f4ba86bab5d75933ed577f0ad[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/dEOu6JB.jpg "90bd522f4ba86bab5d75933ed577f0ad[1].jpg")
>>1348873
Americans used to eat lots of opossum before the meat industry was modernized. Game meat in general just isn't as popular anymore because you usually have to prepare it yourself and commercial meats are much cheaper.
>>1349642
god I'm tired I read the first line as "altright conversation"
>>1349650
Fun fact: Locusts ARE kosher.
Da joos, etc. Whatever.
Till 19th century middle and lower class people in central europe started their day with a Biersuppe (beersoup) because coffee and tea were to expensive
>>1349650
What's wrong with beans?
>>1349757
Wonder what it tasted like?
>>1349650
Fucking niggers I swear.
Why is olive oil historically significant?
Also, Rum. It's been the focus of a war or two, and basically standard kit for naval water supplies.
>>1350171
they also used acorn and Chicory
as coffe substitutes.
>>1350380
>Why is olive oil historically significant?
greeks used it to lube young boipussy :DDDD
>>1350321
heavenly by all accounts I've read and heard
http://cannundrum.blogspot.com/2013/12/baked-opossum.html
We had a really good thread about this during /his/'s first week
I have nothing to contribute other than I learned that Mesopotamians got paid in beer today
Have a courtesy bump for making a thread /pol/ cant ruin
>>1350321
It tastes bad. Dont ask how I know.
>>1350470
white trash pro tip: the possum needs to be fed on corn and whole milk for about 2 weeks before slaughter
>>1350380
It's been pretty much the main form of cooking oil since antiquity
>>1349759
I did too anon.
Thought it was some kind of /pol/ thing
>>1348873
In Imperial China, Tea produced by the bloody empire was actually so fucking valuable in the Central Asia that it was used as currency.
Also in China, the military office of Cavalry Inspector/Master of Horses also monitored tea trade. Largely because the primary supplier of Horses in China were the cunts in Tibet and Ferghana. Nomads living there were willing to part with shitloads of horse herds in exchange for tea, leading to the creation of the Tea-Horse Road from Gansu to Tibet.
Beef jerky and hard tack.
In fact, I make hardtack and enjoy munching on it when it's around. A lot of people say it tastes boring or like shit but I think it's amazing, and I really like it. Sometimes I'll let it simmer in something like a gravy or chicken stock, and it's amazing.
That's a pretty easy historical recipe that can be made in about an hour, and it'll last until we're history too.
>>1350171
Fug i wanna make beer soup
>>1348873
Bread has been the most important staple food of the Western world since the beginnings of agriculture. Most if not all people in antiquity and the middle ages ate shitloads of bread and washed it all down with cheap ale.
>>1350741
bread AND cheese
Gin and garum. Obviously.
>>1349711
But on the other hand it's extremely calorie-dense, can convert otherwise inedible vegetation into nutrition, is portable both on the hoof and preserved and loses virtually nothing except water weight in preservation.
Johny Appleseed planted apples for cider-making, not eating.
>>1351377
>can convert otherwise inedible vegetation into nutrition
Except we could have grown edible vegetation on that land too
>>1351410
Okay then, feel free to go clamber up that mountain to plant whatever you can in the nooks and crannies instead of just turning the goats loose on it. Or maybe you'd rather spend several months of back-breaking labor digging a miles-long irrigation ditch to water crops that will have to be abandoned if some warlord decides that he wants your newly-improved clay.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUt1ZHs3wQ8
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg
>>1351427
Okay.
>>1351393
>Johny Appleseed planted apples for cider-making, not eating.
Don't you have to graft apple trees, or else play the genetic lottery when growing them from seed?
>>1351511
More-or-less.
However, he planted nurseries instead of trees - basically, you just plant a bunch of trees from seed, wait for them to fruit and then propagate ones that bear the fruit you want while culling the rest to make room.
Growing fruit trees is pretty fascinating, really. It makes you feel like Frankenstein.
>>1351427
Yea bud, that's absolutely the context we were discussing
Good job, you really contributed to the discussion
>>1351432
I've been watching this nonstop for the past hour
gonna make me some sauerkraut today
>>1348873
Canned food. Arguably the most important military invention since cured meat and gunpowder.
>>1350706
And the British turned India into a massive opium factory to sell opium to the Chinese to make money to pay for tea, until they were able to figure out how to steal the secret of growing tea.
Which itself is a fascinating story about a Scottish botanist going to China, disguising himself as a Mandarin and running around stealing tea plants and trying to lure Chinese growers to India.
>>1349623
Except oil is actually fueling everything we do and sugar is mostly god for pleasing our taste buds
Cato's On Agriculture has some recipes. I've tried making variation of his breads. The libum turned out pretty good.
>>1352653
It's OK really Brits still make shit tea compared to Chinks and South Asians.
>>1349642
Based
>>1350380
Because olive oil is versatile, and so it was desired for cooking, cleaning, cosmetics and perfumes, religious rituals. Where it was abundant, it was traded for other materials (tin, dye, pottery), and so it formed part of the 'globalised' trade system across Mediterranean empires, by which the palace economies of Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Egypt + The Hittites variously flourished.
>>1349711
Coming from someone whose family raises cattle, it is also less destructive to land and allows you to have agriculture on land you cannot have industrial crop growing operations (ignoring factory farming.
Grass fed livestock doesn't waste as much resources as factory farming things and if done correctly leaves land alone.
>>1350749
Why is this the only mention of cheese?
>>1353043
>it is also less destructive to land
Not west of the Mississippi it sure as hell isn't.
>>1353057
It depends how you do it, of course. But compare it to what happens in west Texas when you grow cotton
>>1350706
Why was tea worth so much to fucking Mongols?
>>1351432
>>1352456
I found myself a new subscription.
I like these historical recipe things because self-sufficient/survival preparedness is almost kinda sorta a hobby of mine.
>>1353069
Because it's a fucking drug. Britain got addicted to it too.
But apparently we are supposed to cry a river because the British started selling drugs right back to China.
>>1352653
>>1349650
Speaking as somebody trying to eat better who bought a bigass bag of them, the taste, availability, and public perception of people who eat bugs are all obstacles.
The legs are delicious and taste almost exactly like sunflower seeds, except with little barbs on them that don't hurt unless you stuff your face full of them. The bodies and heads have a taste reminiscent of less-than-fresh lump crab meat combined with shrimp shells.
Not bad, but not great. I might buy them more if they were in any stores around here.
>>1353277
I bet they aren't that cheap either. They aren't subsidized like beef is.
>>1353277
Locusts used to be a common dish where I live, not anymore though as far as I know.
Was served as curry with a plate of rice
>>1352924
Fucking right. It's like coffee, once you've had loose leaf tea or Turkish coffee, everything else is a pale imitator.
>>1353270
They got addicted to Gin too, which (IIRC) was the first crack cocaine-style drug epidemic.
And at the same time they had their very own bitcoin/housing market bubble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
>>1349650
Im sure those kikes would love to see me eat fucking bugs but I ain't gonna
>>1353321
I'd eat bugs if they were a little bigger. If you could shell them like shrimp and get a decent amount of meat they wouldn't be so bad. Call locusts "prairie Shrimp" and people would warm up to the idea.
>>1353044
>millenials everywhere
Because nobody else read Asterix and nobody ever learnt to prepare delicious lard and cheese soup.
>>1353069
Two reasons: caffeine and flavours plain boiled water
>>1351436
Incan agriculture is so cool. They basically created agronomy as a science
>>1353447
The husks are the whole thing basically and they are the part that tastes like chitin and old crab meat.
If you meant texturally, they're just crunchy. If you stuff too many in your mouth at once, the barbs on the legs or the legs themselves or the little pole-things attached to the back near the wings will poke you in the mouth.
Crickets kind of remind me of corn chips in that regard - eat a few at a time, they're fine. Eat too many at once and they'll start poking you HARD in the most sensitive spots in your mouth.
>>1348873
The Potato
It fed the industrial revolution
>>1350722
>Hard tack
What recipe do you use?
>>1354060
Flour, salt, and water. I don't measure it.
>>1348873
I think sausages was another masterpiece of German engineering, it was the most efficient food as it used all the shitty parts of an animal and made it edible.
>>1349650
Good thing I live in a free society and the free market will fix it in the third world
In most western countries eating dog is considered taboo. However in many SE Asian countries and in Polynesia it seems to be a common practice.
Was there a point in history where eating dog was common for most cultures? Or has using dogs as a food source been something that developed in some regions within the last few centuries?
Oh shit, a quality thread on /his.
Anyone want a report on the retardedly poor food of 19nth century Romania?
>>1357115
Eh fuck it might as well, start with it nobody is posting anyway
>>1356556
It wasn't uncommon for people to eat cats and dogs during famines or lengthy sieges, but that's about it. Dogs are good hunting partners and cats kill disease-carrying pests, they were much more useful to people alive than as food.
>>1357149
The main food was "mamaliga" (pic related, a type of polenta). It was eaten way more than wheat bread.
>"They sometimes make mamaliga 3 times a day"
The reason was that mamaliga was easier to make. It was boiled and quick to cook which means in required less fire and no oven which was a luxury to the poor peasants at the time.
1/?
>>1357181
cont.
White wheat flour which is found everywhere today was highly valued as it was used ritualistic baked goods such as "cozonaci" (top pic) & "colaci" (bottom pic).
They were baked commonly during the major religious holidays.
2/?
Romans had pretty comfy diets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkbwhk1Eq80
>>1357246
They also ate a lot of things that are not eaten in modern day Romania such as :coltsfoot, beet leaves, buckwheat, hemp oil, "julfa" a cheese substitute also made from hemp oil that was used during lent ( can't find any data on this did they really have hemp tofu back then ?).
I've never been able to find a straight or backed up answer to this.
Rich people in the Edwardian era often had dinners with over 8 courses, and when you see recreations of these dishes the portions don't appear radically different from a modern entree portion. Were the portions actually this big? Did they eat everything and just stuff themselves? Did they eat a bite from everything and was this considered good etiquette?
If you haven't watched the Supersizers historical series you should. Great stuff. The French Revolution (which goes from court of Louis XVI to the directory era) is my favorite episode.
>>1357352
All portions used to be smaller and dinners often lasted several hours.
>>1357358
>Supersizers, history of food, mainly in Britain
The show must be good for other reasons because the food they make is no doubt awful.
>>1357281
cont.
Perhaps the most shocking thing was low input of animal based products and not only because of the strict practicing of lent ( 2 days a week without animal products and varios periods of required lent which almost ended up to half a year of lent).
Peasants would often sell animal based products such as poultry, livestock or butter in order to get things that they could not get on their farms.
They would often settle for a vegetarian meal consisting of the ever present mamaliga alongside some boiled vegetables and leaves with the occasional eggs, salted fish(they were cheaper than meat back then) and only rarely meat.
>"Even if they have a cow or chickens they sell their products and do not consume them"
>"With the money they buy handcrafted goods or if they have unmarried girls they buy makeup and other womanly products. They trade food for poisons"
>"The women take the care to grow chicks, ducks ad geese but they sell them to buy makeup "
(as a side note makeup were called "sulimanuri" a derivative from the Turkish Suleiman as it was seen as something only the Turkish could afford)
>"If they have eggs, milk or cheese they sell them at the market and then go to the local tavern"
(another side note, tavern owner and trader were some of the jobs allowed to performed by jews. You can see how this effected the view of jews in Romania later.)
>"And in other areas women will eat mamaliga with onions so that she can make herself a city dress and will toil a whole summer for it"
4/?
wew this long posts are hard brb lemme grab a beer.
>>1357377
har har har
>>1357358
>Supersizers
Shit for history, pretty much utterly worthless, but mildly entertaining
>>1357405
>Shit for history, pretty much utterly worthless
Examples?
>>1357386
This trend of poor nutrition was not always because of poverty.
Even the wealthy peasants ate as bad as the poor ones.
When asked why they would answer that that is how their parents ate, and their grandparents and great-grandparents ate so they will now change it.
Generations of poverty have ingrained bad nutrition into the public culture.
Oftentimes they would justify a vegetarian meal as being easier to cook.
Another factor contributing to this were the great periods of lent especially during spring (Great Lent) when the hardest field work was happening.
The peasants end up starving themselves during their period of hardest work then then stuffing themselves during winter when they do mostly nothing.
>>1357460
The most dangerous tradition was harvesting the corn at an exact date every ear regardless of the state of the corn.
Thus they collected unripe corn which when not stored properly would turn bad and mold.
The peasants would still consume this regardless of the taste.
Back then it was believed that this caused Pellagra a devastating disease that caused insomnia, edema, eczema, ataxia, nerve damage, paralysis, mental confusion, diarrhea, lesions, sensitivity to sunlight, lesions, swollen tongue, enlarged heart, psychosis, aggressiveness, hallucinations and eventually dementia (This is like the jackpot of shitty diseases).
Today it is know that it is caused by a lack of proper nutrition in combination with some toxins found in untreated corn.
From wikipedia:
>The traditional food preparation method of maize ("corn"), nixtamalization, by native New World cultivators who had domesticated corn, required treatment of the grain with lime, an alkali. The lime treatment has been shown to make niacin nutritionally available and reduce the chance of developing pellagra.[23] When maize cultivation was adopted worldwide, this preparation method was not accepted because the benefit was not understood. The original cultivators, often heavily dependent on maize, did not suffer from pellagra; it became common only when maize became a staple that was eaten without the traditional treatment.
This disease ravaged the countryside during those times.
(Not sure but this may explain why maize never really caught on as a staple diet in Western Europe as there apparently was an active effort of stopping people from eating corn since they believed they carried this disease.
E-Europe being poor as shit and with rulers who couldn't give a fuck about their people continued to use it.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqFzRSwX3Fs
>>1357559
The stuffed chicken was the pinnacle of fancy cooking, usually done at weddings or important religious celebrations.
Funny enough there are a lot of mentions of snail eating, mostly during spring. They would be boiled, and the fried or chopped into food.
These became a delicacy later in history for some reason.
The ever present flavoring was garlic. Garlic sauce being described as a constant presence on the table.
7/8
>>1357602
cont.
Hope you liked this. It's sad that not a lot has been written about the nutrition of various peoples.
In my opinion food is the most honest reflection of a society.
It really cuts through all the nationalistic bullshit when you see how the common folk lived and ate.
Also keep in mind that this was a short summary of most of the info so it may not have all the details.
Thank you for reading.
8/8
>>1357629
This was some based shit, good anon. I don't suppose you have any similar lectures for the nutritions of other cultures?
>>1350171
Roasted chickpeas mimic coffee pretty well.
>>1357602
I wonder what it is about garlic which attracts people to it so much. Ease of cultivation? Just the taste? It's almost as commonplace as salt and pepper.
>>1357675
The fact that it's so universal is why. You can put it on everything from eggs to potatoes to greens to chicken to nuts and it will add depth and flavor while masking notes of spoilage - and because it's cheap, easy to cultivate pretty much anywhere and preserves well, it's easily accessible to even the poorest strata of society. Pretty much the only negative things you can say about garlic is that it makes you smell like garlic and that it's not good in sweets.
>>1349650
>UN reports
We looked at the data
>>1357629
>muh disdain for nationalism
>muh vegetarian peasants
Nu eşti pe Facebook. Ieşi din rolul de postac că nu te plăteşte-n plus.
>>1357170
Sure I can understand that dogs / cats / etc. were more useful to most cultures alive than dead. Usually they were last-resort food.
But some cultures bred dogs SPECIFICALLY to eat:
>The Nureongi (Korean: 누렁이) is a yellowish landrace from Korea. Similar to other native Korean dog breeds, such as the Jindo, nureongi are medium-sized spitz-type dogs, but are larger with greater musculature and a distinctive coat pattern. They are quite uniform in appearance, yellow hair and melanistic masks. Nureongi are most often used as a livestock dog, raised for its meat, and not commonly kept as pets.
>The Hawaiian Poi Dog or ʻīlio (ʻīlio mākuʻe for brown-furred Poi dogs) is an extinct breed of pariah dog from Hawaiʻi which was used by Native Hawaiians as a spiritual protector of children and as a source of food.
>>1349659
You think vegans eat insects? Do you know what either of those words mean?
>>1357892
Do you want to fucking fight me, faggot?
>>1357910
I would like to, yes.
>>1357914
You and I are going to brawl.
>>1357945
I wanted to try out my gains in a real fight, anyway.
>>1357716
It was also one of the only spicy things you could add in your food until chilly and pepper were introduced.
Although I do remember my dad mentioning some type of spicy cranberry type fruit that isn't grown anymore but was used extensively in forested areas.
I don't think food was that bland back in the day, but it just very regional.
People just didn't have the time to grow everything they wanted so they just grew the staples and foraged for spices and flavors.
This was probably what makes the documentation so hard as every village or region probably had their specific plants that they traditionally used.
As you can see on my posts above tradition was more important than everything except religion to the peasantry.
New crops or experimentation was met with heavy resistance most of the times.
>>1357654
No, sorry just this stuff I tried to translate and summarize, hopefully some other anons will post stuff about their national historical diets.
>>1357818
What exactly is your problem with this? I didn't know Antena 3 watchers know how to use the internet let alone go to 4chan. Good for you, functional retard that you are, experimenting the wonders of technology.
>>1357386
Am I actually learning stuff on /his/? Cool stuff, thanks anon.
>>1357559
I wonder if this has something to do with some European cultures disliking corn. I know Germans to some extent don't really eat corn, its considered more as a food for livestock.
Maybe that mindset is a remnant from the period where humans suffered illnesses caused by untreated corn.
![640d04c70c6ae11957bcf5a09eba4012[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Tie2tpa.jpg "640d04c70c6ae11957bcf5a09eba4012[1].jpg")
>>1353480
>shrimp
idk about locusts, but if I were to try bugs I'd probably start with these. I'm imagining a toasted mealy acorn flavor.
OP here, this thread came out far better than I ever hoped it'd be, thanks /his/
In the ancient Arab world, it was common to simply wait for a traveling caravan to pass by that was headed towards your destination; you'd pay a sum to join them a, load up your camel with yours stock and a share of food and away you went, the large group provided protection from attackers, a navigator to lead the group through the desert, and sometimes even a singer who would soothe the camels and men with his voice among other benefits (sharing of food in need, companionship, etc.).
Common travel foods included packed dates which lasted very, very long, water, honey when available (or even better, date syrup), dried meats (and fresh, if they were to happen by a bedoin tribe along the way), and flour (not so sure if bread was common, I remember reading of someone who would mix stale bread with water to make it edible but not much more).
Due to the difficult of growing vegetables most dishes consisted of meat, and since everything was usually cooked in a single pot stews were very common leading to a very large variety in meaty dishes, breads that weren't cooked in a stone oven (like flat breads) included Khibs rgag (very large and thin, literally means 'flaky bread') and Chbab (pancakes) which were cooked on a curved stone on a fire.
>>1359069
The most sensible thing would be to bring flour with you instead of bread. You literally only need a bit of water to make pita bread.
>>1350180
Not complete in amino acids and contain iron antinutrients.
>>1357818
Prostule.
>>1360211
i agree
>>1357559
>moldy corn
delicious, for the record
