Faine Greenwood: It is fun to see how uncomfortable some people get when you point out how many of their venerated traditional recipes are extremely dependent on New World produce that no one in their country had heard of before the 1500s.

It is fun to see how uncomfortable some people get when you point out how many of their venerated traditional recipes are extremely dependent on New World produce that no one in their country had heard of before the 1500s.

I fondly remember the day on the old site when somebody gently pointed out that chilis come from Mexico and no place else was using them in cooking before the 16th century and a bunch of people from Asia and Africa got mildly freaked out. Is vindaloo Mexican food?

Potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, paprika! Ketchup would have been a sauce only kings and queens could experience, and now we give it away freely.

What were the Romans eating in the glory days of the empire? Sure wasn’t pasta with tomato sauce. All the folks making common cause with Orban’s chauvinist poison… Where did that goulash or chicken paprikash come from? “I hate fusion food, I much prefer a traditional spaghetti.” Sure sure. Also…

The Romans were actually eating a lot of fermented fish sauce (garum), similar to what’s considered typically southeast Asian today.

The meatballs, they were fish all along

Love it

If you really want to upset the "return to tradition" lot: Black people were in Italy before tomatoes.

Black people actually introduced the rice needed for Spanish paella and Italian risotto.

But they got it from China by way of Indian and Arab traders hugging the coast of the Indian Ocean.

And in the UK before potatoes; that's quite a good one too. Not to mention tea!

I believe there have been Black people on the island of Britain since before England existed, considering the number of invading forces we've had.

Oh boy now you’ve brought tea into it. I distinctly heard someone ‘tut’ under their breath. This could he dangerous.

As a fully qualified Tea Drinking Brit™️, I applaud the ‘there were Black people in England/UK before potatoes’ (it’s factually correct, after all). And I’m still reading (slow reader) this excellent book: www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Tudors...

Black Tudors: The Untold Story: Amazon.co.uk: Kaufmann, Miranda: 9781786073969: Bookswww.amazon.co.uk Buy Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Kaufmann, Miranda (ISBN: 9781786073969) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

Thanks for reminding me about that book, looks fascinating, must remember to check it out.

Some of the Gladiator’s best friends…

Some will get murderously upset about it and forget to torture you first

I feel like, generically, "the food traditions we have now mostly date to living memory or nor long before" is weird and hard for people, like with that Italian marxist guy who keeps pointing out that e.g. Tiramisu is from the '80s and then gets death threats

The guy who created tiramisu lives in Baltimore and my wife has met him lmao

Oh man that’s awesome

Yeah it was back when her dad ran an upscale coffee shop for college kids, somehow found out about the guy, and contracted him to MAKE tiramisus for them to sell. Low-key legendary

Whoa!

I refuse to believe that The Romans did not eat tiramisu while battling Visigoths.

I can’t help but think of tiramisu as candy lasagna

I have some sad news about Ado Campeol.

Ah, not that much of a shock. I was just realizing that was 15 years ago (!)

Did she thank him for his service?

Campeol's obituary here claims that mixing mascarpone, biscuits, sugar & coffee already existed, I think it's a big challenge distinguishing between when something was 'invented' and when it was codified or popularised www.theguardian.com/food/2021/oc... www.accademiadeltiramisu.com/en/tiramisu-...

Italy’s father of tiramisu dies aged 93www.theguardian.com Restaurateur Ado Campeol launched the coffee-flavoured dessert, whose name means ‘lift me up’, in 1972

I really enjoyed reading this (published 1972) trying to track the origins of fish & chips, and it's genuinely a struggle to chart the cutoff point between just frying fish and using the kind of batter anyone would recognise today, or whether it's paired with chipped vs baked potatoes

Wasn’t it an Italian Jewish thing?

Wouldn’t that be cool if it was? Weird and cool. Little cognitive dissonance going on for me.

@swordsjew.bsky.social had a phenomenal newsletter that I'm completely failing to track down about some kind of Spanish fish fritter that traced the influence of Jewish people on the world of delicious fried fish

That's what I thought! I've got no idea what the latest conclusions are, but IIRC Priestland thinks there's no evidence of Joseph Malin pairing fish & chips by 1865 and that it was Bradfordians like 'Granny' Duce who mixed northern chips and southern fried fish

I heard the fish was Sephardic Jews (not Italian) by way of the Low Countries (Belgium/Netherlands).

Yes to Sephardi Jews bringing over fried fish, and the first waves of Jewish immigrants post-Civil War were from the Low Countries, though Joseph Malin was notably Ashkenazi

certainly the counter-argument in almost all these cases -- fondue, pad thai, pho, tiramisu, carbonara -- is that people have been eating something roughly similar for a long time, and to some degree that's fair enough but I don't think that tells you that much about its existence pre-codification

so many things require commoditized ingredients for mass adoption, even if they existed in some form very locally for longer

The United States of Arugula by David Kamp is great on this. Story after story of the American food market discovering some ingredient that took, like, Italian monks years to make, and swamping it with WWII US middle class levels of demand. Balsamic vinegar is one memorable example.

Pho is from the early 1900s Pad thai was invented in the 1930s to market Thai nationalism Greek salad as we conceive of it was invented in the 60s to sell to tourists (which only picked up around then because, well, let's just say fuck the British)

Fondue was invented in the 30s by the cheese industry

Cream cheese is older than modern Camembert

I beg your pardon, but I have access to historical documents which pRoOvE that fondue has existed for thousands of years!

And that Ciabatta was invented in 1982

I find this oddly comforting. My family history is definitely "American mutt". The oldest recipes in the family clearly came from a cookbook my grandma bought in the 50s. I thought we were weird for not having family culinary traditions going back centuries, but I guess we're just honest about it

I'm going to be the last person who knows my mom's recipes she got from her mom because I as oldest daughter was expected to learn to cook, and my siblings weren't interested in cooking while she was still alive, and she never wrote anything down. So grandma's recipes live in my faulty brain.

We do seem to have a family tradition of not liking to cook, so each generation goes looking for easier ways to throw together something decent with as little hassle as possible. That's definitely part of the problem 😅

If a food predates pasteurization I don't want it anyway

I cook a lot of dishes which involve several hours in a heavy pot in a low oven, technically this "predates pasteurisation" but I promise the effect is achieved :)

Italian food is just Mexican - Chinese fusion BOOM

Has anyone mentioned yet that ciabatta was invented in 1982

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