/hfg/ - Historical foods general

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

What's wrong with beans?

Wonder what it tasted like?

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.

they also used acorn and Chicory
as coffe substitutes.

>Why is olive oil historically significant?
greeks used it to lube young boipussy :DDDD

heavenly by all accounts I've read and heard

cannundrum.blogspot.com/2013/12/baked-opossum.html

We had a really good thread about this during Veeky Forums'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

It tastes bad. Dont ask how I know.

white trash pro tip: the possum needs to be fed on corn and whole milk for about 2 weeks before slaughter

It's been pretty much the main form of cooking oil since antiquity

I did too user.

Thought it was some kind of /pol/ thing

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.

Fug i wanna make beer soup

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.

bread AND cheese

Gin and garum. Obviously.

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.

>can convert otherwise inedible vegetation into nutrition

Except we could have grown edible vegetation on that land too

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.

>youtube.com/watch?v=qUt1ZHs3wQ8

>youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg

Okay.

>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?

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.

Yea bud, that's absolutely the context we were discussing

Good job, you really contributed to the discussion

I've been watching this nonstop for the past hour
gonna make me some sauerkraut today

Canned food. Arguably the most important military invention since cured meat and gunpowder.

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.

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.

It's OK really Brits still make shit tea compared to Chinks and South Asians.

Based

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.

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.

Why is this the only mention of cheese?

>it is also less destructive to land
Not west of the Mississippi it sure as hell isn't.

It depends how you do it, of course. But compare it to what happens in west Texas when you grow cotton

Why was tea worth so much to fucking Mongols?

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.

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.

...

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.

I bet they aren't that cheap either. They aren't subsidized like beef is.

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

Fucking right. It's like coffee, once you've had loose leaf tea or Turkish coffee, everything else is a pale imitator.

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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

how bad are the husks

Im sure those kikes would love to see me eat fucking bugs but I ain't gonna

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.

>millenials everywhere
Because nobody else read Asterix and nobody ever learnt to prepare delicious lard and cheese soup.

Two reasons: caffeine and flavours plain boiled water

Incan agriculture is so cool. They basically created agronomy as a science

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.

The Potato
It fed the industrial revolution

>Hard tack
What recipe do you use?

Flour, salt, and water. I don't measure it.

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.

Good thing I live in a free society and the free market will fix it in the third world

Literally none of his videos disappoint. I love his videos.

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?

bump

Oh shit, a quality thread on /his.
Anyone want a report on the retardedly poor food of 19nth century Romania?

Eh fuck it might as well, start with it nobody is posting anyway

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.

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/?

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
youtube.com/watch?v=dkbwhk1Eq80

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.

All portions used to be smaller and dinners often lasted several hours.

>Supersizers, history of food, mainly in Britain
The show must be good for other reasons because the food they make is no doubt awful.

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.

har har har

>Supersizers
Shit for history, pretty much utterly worthless, but mildly entertaining

>Shit for history, pretty much utterly worthless

Examples?

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.

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.)

youtube.com/watch?v=kqFzRSwX3Fs

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

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

This was some based shit, good user. I don't suppose you have any similar lectures for the nutritions of other cultures?

Roasted chickpeas mimic coffee pretty well.

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.

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.

>UN reports

We looked at the data

>muh disdain for nationalism
>muh vegetarian peasants
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