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Tomatoes are associated with Italy, but they are not a traditional Italian ingredient. The plant was introduced from Americas in mid-1500's, and became a staple
by bostik 5y ago
Tomatoes are associated with Italy, but they are not a traditional Italian ingredient. The plant was introduced from Americas in mid-1500's, and became a staple only during the 1700's.
0: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/noodles/2018/07/03/history-of-the-tomato-in-italy-and-china-tracing-the-role-of-tomatoes-in-italian-and-chinese-cooking/ https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/noodles/2018/07/03/history-of...
- adrianN 5y agoMany other things that I consider integral parts of Italian culture are not much older.
- spacechild1 5y agoThat's a bit ridiculous. 300 years is not old enough to be considered “traditional“?
- axlee 5y agoWhat is your cutoff in terms of time for what is traditional or not? I would wager that 300+ years is more than enough for any custom to be qualified as traditional.
- thechao 5y agoAccording to most Europeans I talk to, the cutoff is whatever makes European culture authentic, and American culture shallow. My favorite conversation was between myself, an Austrian, my best friend from China, and a friend from Tyre: > Austrian: America doesn’t have a culture — it’s only really been around for a few hundred years: my family has chairs older than that! We date back to the 1100s! > (Best friend from China): my village’s local temple (the core) was more than 500 years old in the 1100s; your culture is still getting started! > (Friend from Tyre): my house is in the new part of the city built by Alexander in 330 … BC. The old city was established further back in the past from the new city, than the new city is from now. Until your people have lived in a place for at least 2000 years, how can you really say you “own” it? Then we got a beer & watched “Dancing With the Stars”.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThe interesting thing about China now is that they have been actively destroying their remnants of ancient culture to try to speed economic development. As a consequence their culture is converging somewhat towards the cultural revolution which is only about 70 years old. So they are a young political culture in that regards, and politics dominates due to its military force.
- bostik 5y agoSomething that would have been known as age-old by the time the enlightenment started to set in. So that's what, 1300's as the cutoff? 300 years is barely enough to establish a town pub. For the record, I'm a Finn. By my own definition, there are maybe only three traditional Finnish foods that have survived that long. Carelian stew, särä, and maybe robber's roast (clay-pit mutton). Whereas something like wine leaf rolls from Greece, Turkey and Lebanon - now those can be properly traditional.
- jrochkind1 5y agoHow old does something have to be in order to be "tradition"? The idea that before some certain point a culture was "frozen" is usually ahistorical. Certainly true for cultures of the Italian penninsula, on the Mediteranean providing easy access to wide swaths of land and peoples, part of a former empire that spanned continents.
- dsr_ 5y agoHow old does something have to be in order to be "tradition"? Easy: as soon as the people who adopted it into the current form are dead and the adoption forgotten. My grandmother's cherry island cake was almost certainly copied off the back of a package sometime in the 1920s or 30s; maybe it's an adaptation of a German or Hungarian recipe. Now it's a tradition in my family.