Max Miller on youtube says he knows how to make Garum - the fish sauce that is often referenced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE Now sure if that is genuine, i previously read that the recipe for this stuff has been lost (but the Author says his receipe is based on Byzantine sources) More about the author here: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Tasting_History_with_Max_Mil... it says his historical cookbook will be published next year, in 2022.
The idea that you can't make garrum at home in the traditional way (salt, fish, time) is false. I've done it, yes there's a smell, but it isn't as bad as people suggest, and the result is worth it. Traditional garrum making is also practiced by lots of fermentation focused restaurants, as well as more modern techniques that use koji as an enzymatic source.
The quick garrum presented in that video is really just a salty fish stock, and I suspect would lack the protein breakdown products that make garrum so special.
You can however make garrum quickly, with the protein breakdown products, albeit lacking a little complexity from the extended ageing (primarily maillard reaction products, but probably other lactic fermentation and more complex breakdown chains).
Preston Landers has created a technique [1] that uses dietary supplements as a source of very high enzyme concentrations. I've done this method, and it's pretty easy to accomplish, and produces really great results, in about 3 hours.
> The idea that you can't make garrum at home in the traditional way (salt, fish, time) is false.
When I researched this question maybe 8 years ago, the technique was well understood. The outstanding question was which fish was used for this historically, and back then there were a few contenders. Has this since been settled or did you just pick one?
Very similar I'd say. Temperature, fish variety, small changes in method or salt content, all of these likely change the end product. But it's fundamentally the same set of reactions.
The russian salted fish appears to be very different from garum.
With Balyk you salt the fish-flesh to make it dry out and to conserve it. Then you eat the dry fish. Do i see that right?
With garum you salt the fish to drive a fishy liquid out of it then you ferment this liquid. The end product is the fermented fish-juice which is used as a condiment.
Both involves fish and salt but they appear to be very different beasts.
About how offputing garum is: obviously it wasn’t offputting for the romans. They consumed huge ammounts of it. That doesn’t necessarily means that the production wasn’t offputting. After all it is basically letting a pile of fish rot in a controlled manner. By all accounts i have read they produced it at industrial scale outside of the cities not in people’s homes.
The other problem one might run into is that the exact art of the process needs reverse engineering. Imagine if all you would read about cheese making is a few paragraphs. Further imagine that you have never eaten cheese nor you know anyone who has ever did. Good luck figuring out where to start making chesse, let alone if what you got at the end is good cheese. This means that while real garum was definietly not offputting to romans, the process of experimenting with producing it now might be. And at the end you might end up with something weird and you won’t know if you just haven’t acquired a taste for it, or if perhaps it went off so badly that not even a roman would consume it.
"To recreate this 2,000-year-old dish, Magnanimi started with a recipe from the 1st-Century AD Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, the only surviving recipe book from ancient Rome, which is attributed to Apicius, a wealthy gourmand once described by Pliny the Elder as "the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts"."
I could have sworn I learned about Apicus from an ancient HN thread... but apparently it's never been linked on here before? Did moths eat the thread?
heavy use of tomatoes is more typical of Italian-American dishes, although Italy has many differing cuisine traditions and its hard to generalize, they more typically rely on seafood and rice in the south, and butter, cream, cheese and potatoes in the north than they do tomatoes (although pasta and olive oil are unquestionably universals in Italian cooking).
Same applies to most spicy food we now eat in Europe, until the discovery age there were no chilli peppers around, even the African ones came from Americas.
Seems the further east the spicer mustard gets - Russian mustard seems to be quite similar to what I tried in Chinese restaurants in US (but a lot thicker, the stuff in Chinese restaurants is runny).
By comparison German stuff is much sweater. Horseradish sauces are another matter though!
The east/west distinction probably isn't useful here beyond the observation that black mustard seeds are the hottest followed by brown and then yellow mustard seeds, and that western mustards tend to use yellow only or yellow and brown seeds. Something like English mustard is notoriously hot for instance.
As a German, and I'm probably also speaking for Russians and Chinese here, I'm quite puzzled by this.
We consume more than one kind of mustard, one of them being aptly called "Süßer Senf" - sweet mustard[1], which is pretty far from your ordinary mustard in every way. It isn't hot at all, mostly sweet. You wouldn't use it instead of regular mustard (or vice-versa).
There's just no way "German mustard" is referring to anything specific enough to start making such comparisons. You'd have to narrow it down to regions of Germany to get anywhere, such as a Bavaria, the origin of sweet mustard.
Then you haven't had the stuff that really crawls into your nose and sinuses. It's a diffent kind of hot to chili spicyness, but the burn is absolutely there.
Or is this some kind of "nothing is too spicy for me" one-upmanship? Spicyness is useless if you don't have flavor to go along with it.
Many types of plant from the Americas (the continent not "USA! USA!") and make up what people eat all over the world; potatoes, peppers, corn, tomatoes, chocolate, peanuts, vanilla.
A little broader than that. The entire Capsicum family -- from bell peppers to chili peppers -- was introduced to the Old World during the Columbian exchange.
Black pepper is an entirely separate species, and is indeed native to southeast Asia.
The Indian pepper (black and white) being the original, and the totally unrelated American plant apparently having got the same name in English just because it, too, can be very spicy. It can get rather confusing to people who aren't native English speakers. My guess is, the GP missed the plural -s in your comment, and lacking any other attribute like "bell" or "chili", it's no wonder IMO they thought original Indian black/white pepper was what you were talking about.
(It's enough to make you wish English could come up with some other name for the damn things. Come now, she boasts the largest vocabulary of any language -- is there any sensible reason she can't come up with some other name for the paprika fruit than "pepper"?!?)
i was wondering, there is a lot of evidence of pre Columbian contact; the Vikings were in America, the Phoenicians were probably there, the Chinese too, but noone thought of bringing back any tomato seeds. i mean without Columbus, we Europeans would still be eating garum with meat, and that without potato chips, without salad.
There really isn't a lot of evidence of pre-columbian contact. Outside the Bering strait region, the only firmly established contacts are that of the Norse. Polynesian contacts may have occurred, but aren't considered definitive. Nothing else is considered remotely plausible. That means there weren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to get American plants back to Europe prior to Columbus.
"there weren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to get American plants back to Europe prior to Columbus"
Thinking about this myself a while ago, I wondered - even if someone went there and back, and even brought something along, how could we tell? That Norse saga had a mythical status at most, and even with that it isn't necessarily clear for a casual listener that it may be about reaching another previously unknown continent. Other groups along the history may have also pulled it off, but then their contemporaries, in order to consemnate the event, had to take their word for it? Even with some seeds as evidence, the world was less connected untill very recently and there were plenty of isolated places, yet relatively close, for strange seeds to be found. After thousand of years, it's hard to tell if an annual plant was brought at some point in time by intercontinental explorers, or migrated by some other non-human related way, or has been local since before continents went appart. Then it was hard to discern the magnitude of a discovery. Even the Norsemen, like the later Spaniard colonists, couldn't tell how big their found body of land was, if the Vinland they reached was an island they haven't yet circumnavigated yet or happened to be a continent spanning south down to well into southern hemisphere. No, for a discovery like this to stick, with clear compiled inventories of imported plants, it had to be done by a government-like entity, that could afford the high risks of loss that an exploration program on the limits of available technology pose, and with enough logistics and cultural development to pursue a wide range of interests (as opposed to small groups, for which keeping track of traffiked plants may be of lesser concern).
The evidence (both linguistic and genetic) currently seems to tilt in favor of the idea that Polynesian contact did occur, as evidenced by the presence of pre-Columbian sweet potato cultivation in Polynesia.
Although natural dispersal of Sweet Potato is a possible explanation, the evidence for natural dispersal is weaker than the evidence for pre-Columbian contact (for instance, the similarity of the Quechua word for sweet potato, "kumar", and the Maori "kumara").
The evidence bar for contacts is very high. My personal position is favorable towards limited (but existing) contacts, but it'd be a lie to say that it's definitively established.
Scandinavians were in America during the viking period, but there isn’t any evidence that suggest they returned.
You have to realise that a lot of the people who went that route weren’t “vikings” as such. Going viking was something you did, but 90% of Scandinavians were just farmers. In fact the reason we are such a homogeneous people here is largely because most farmers even had little contact with the sea-sized settlements that did go Viking. The Scandinavian explorers who headed north from Iceland and eventually ended up in America were likely farmers who had lost their lands for whatever reason, and as such were likely settlers rather than warriors. Many who would have had no intention of ever going back, even if they hadn’t perished.
I’m not a big expert on ecology, but I also think that the climate they landed in was basically worse than what they came from. So there probably wasn’t a whole lot of exotic foods to trade, even if they had wanted to.
Well, there are the Vinland sagas, and while the events in those are pretty wild, the mere existence of those suggests that some actualy did return. They where recorded sometime between 1220 and 1280 so even though this was well after the fact (about 200 years) it's still before the age of exploration.
Edit: As for the tomato question, the sagas suggests that no or very little friendly interaction with the natives took place, so no real trade or exchange of knowledge. These where not full on atlantic voyages but mostly near coastal areas of Greenland and what is now northen Canada. I kinda doubt that the natives would be growing tomatoes that far north anyway. Though, they did claim to find grapes, which suggests that they ventured a fair bit south as well...
First, we have proof of Viking settlements, but they just seemed to die off completely. It may be that before they really got settled, they were just killed by natives.
We don't have actual proof, it seems, of anyone else being here earlier.
Outside of that, the tomato, potato, and a lot of other things, aren't native to Canada, or even the US. It's native to Central and South America, which is 4000 or so km in a direct line, and 7000 or 8000km "hugging the coast" travel from where a viking settlement was found on the coast of Canada.
So just being in the "new world", won't even remotely put you in contact with everything.
On the farming side, no one really understood much about soil management, conditions, crop rotation, fertilizing, drainage, fungus, "growing zones" etc, etc until the 20th century.
Often, attempts to transplant crops would fail miserably, by:
* placing them in the wrong location (some plants die with too much sun, others with too little)
* same as above, but "requires a more southern climate" or "northern climate". Some plants literally cannot grow with short/long day cycles like the far North or South has.
* placing a plant in too wet, or too dry soil for its growth requirements. One plant may rot in a certain type of soil (clay/wet/whatever), another thrive
Well, there are many points like this. Farmers often knew their specific plants, but it was all guesswork compared to scientifically derived knowledge in the early 20th.
So even if a handful of seeds somehow made it back to Europe earlier than Spain getting to the new world and back, there's no promise it would thrive on a first-try.
Especially if it was just fishermen, not even interacting with the natives (maybe, earlier contact as you suggest).
But beyond all that, superstition! When the tomato was first introduced, it was actually seen as a 'sign of the devil'. It was considered evil, and dangerous to eat.
And if you look at corn, for a long time the Brits and much of Europe considered it only suitable as 'pig food'. Most humans wouldn't touch it, and likely this had also to do with taste, for the rural town I grew up had 'cow corn', which is corn hardier, quicker to grow, but not as succulent, or even very tasty (too starchy).
Early farmed corn was like this, starchy, and it took centuries to get the human palatable breeds we have now. Natives in the new world used it just for flour, basically, not as a grain to eat on its own.
And to speak to that, natives had to process corn in a special way:
Potatoes were seen as deadly in some places and illegal, were seen as horrible in other places (and, people had to trick the commoners into eating them:
The failure of the Greenland settlements on the west coast has been documented: the settlers insisted on raising crops and animals that were not suited to the climate, and eventually they starved or moved east again.
They refused to learn from the Inuit residents of Greenland, who were adapted to those conditions and survived just fine. Why? We can't be certain but probably religious and/or racial prejudice did play some role in that.
The YT channel Invicta made an excellent video covering in detail this very topic with regard to the military units, titled "Everyday Moments in History - A Roman Soldier Prepares Dinner".
If this article interests you, give Tasting History on YouTube a look.[0] The host recreates historical recipes and ties in primary-source research along the way. He did a series on Roman food -- what the legions ate, etc.
If a civilization lasted for several hundred years, there's no single answer for that kind of topic. Food is fashion, and is ever changing over time. It's like asking "What did ancient Americans eat between 1600 and 2000?" years in the future, and the answer will vary widely for each century (and regardless of technical progress).
The evolution of cuisines in recent history bares no resemblance to the evolution of cuisines in the late bronze Age to the late antiquity. For one, information was slow to travel, and influences were much further away, and besides that, most agriculture was subsistence farming: families owned land just about enough to feed themselves and sell a bit of surplus, if nothing went wrong). Recipes were passed down generations before any changes would be made by the introduction of new ingredients to the local agriculture. Most families lived on the same ingredients for their entire lives so things were a bit more stagnant than you'd imagine if you're taking recent history as your benchmark.
> Recipes were passed down generations before any changes would be made by the introduction of new ingredients to the local agriculture.
How can you know that to be true as a fact? Do you have a time machine? And new recipes don't need new ingredients to exist. Changing the way you cook things, the temperature, the process, how you mix them, the tools you use, or even random luck can lead to new recipes.
Good point. And different in different regions such as Texas vs NY. Upstate NY vs New York (the city). Even in the same cities within different cultural areas just blocks away from each other!
Now imagine there's only one cookbook left from the 20th century, and then "historians" of the year 3000 will proudly write a publication about "What North Americans Ate During the Middle-Ages (1600-2000)" based on that.
Survivor bias, well known fallacy that Historians are hardly familiar enough with.
I saw this post in my hotel room this morning in downtown Rome and decided to make this restaurant the park around the Appian Way our early afternoon plans. Fantastic meal. Thanks for sharing.
Perhaps see the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie:
> In this “revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to today” (Publishers Weekly), the fascinating story of how one vast country comprised of uniquely distinct regions came to produce some of the most delicious and beloved foods of all time is expertly revealed.
Rome can be considered an early attempt at a "globalized" society - while not strictly global it did bring many different regions and cultures over a very wide area under one administrative umbrella, and opened the doors of trade. Among other things, that lets you do things like regularly consume dishes that use geographically distant ingredients. You could probably go down to the store and buy all kinds of spices pretty much anywhere in the Roman Empire.
I think you're underestimating what could be done with preservation technology such as salting, curing, drying, pickling, fermenting etc. Meats were in fact frequently traded. Salted pork was a staple food. Cheese even more so.
And what of liquids? You're surely aware of ancient wrecks filled with amphoras? What was in them? Surely not cereals. Oils, wines, vinegars, acidic sauces such as the famed "garum" - all travel well.
