11 ms·

In general, most cuisines and culinary trends are far more modern than we tend to assume. Until the last 3-ish centuries: Italy didn't have tomatoes or basil.

• ginko 2y ago
  > The Irish and Germans didn't have potatoes. True, but fwiw I wouldn't consider potato to be particularly important in German cuisine. Sure you'll see it used quite a bit, but many of the more iconic dishes don't really need them or can be replaced like with bread dumplings for instance.
  • jajko 2y ago
    The more east you go from Germany, the more important potatoes are to general population. Especially in the past, but even now they are more popular as side dish compared to ie rice or pasta, maybe due to bigger 'filling the stomach' effect that also lasts longer.
    • bleakenthusiasm 2y ago
      Also rice doesn't grow anywhere near Germany. Today that's not really s factor anymore, because it's so easy to shop, but my parents both grew up sticking very much to a local and seasonal approach to cooking, because everything else was new to them. They eat what they always knew best, so 5-6 days of the week the starchy side were potatoes. Rice is way more filling by transportation effort, but potatoes have been around their entire lives and in my dad's case also what his parents grew on their farm.
      • hnbad 2y ago
        On a related note: German beans are different. You'll find canned kidney beans everywhere because combining them with sweet corn, bell peppers and onions with a seasoning overpowered by vinegar is a popular cheap side salad (often called "Mexico salad") and you'll find Heinz beans in tomato sauce but otherwise it's white beans or green beans. I was happy to discover canned pinto beans at my local supermarket but they were only available in a hot tomato sauce (branded as "chilli beans") - I only just found out the overpriced exotic Italian Wachtelbohnen collecting dust in the shelf next to them are pinto beans too. Heck, I'm nearly 40 and I've met Germans my age who were intrigued (or put off) by couscous because it's so exotic and they've never tried it before. I've talked to people running kebab joints (Dönerbuden) who said that they stopped offering lamb meat because the Germans didn't buy it and the few Turkish and Arab people who frequented them weren't enough to justify the overhead.
        • rico_0803 2y ago
          What German did you meet, that didnt know couscous? Granted, im a fair bit younger, but all of my friends and family know couscous and eat it fairly regularly (im german too). Which is to say: couscous is very well known in germany in general
          • hnbad 2y ago
            > couscous is very well known in germany in general I take it you live in a city. When I lived in Cologne, everyone obviously knew couscous. Rural Germany is a very different place. Granted, this was like 10 years ago but there's a reason we have the saying Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht ("what the peasant doesn't know, he doesn't eat").
        • wheels 2y ago
          Just on a practical note, if you're looking to buy dry beans in Germany, every Turkish supermarket has a whole aisle dedicated to them. You can get a couple dozen kinds of dry beans there, including pinto. Most organic grocery stores have them too, but for 3x the price.
    • littlecranky67 2y ago
      Potatoes play a major role in german cuisine, a fact that you can also observe through architecture by looking at old houses or farms in Germany: The "Kartoffelkeller" (="potato cellar") is a common storage room under a house with no windows/light, for long term storage of potatoes after the harvest. Often there would be slides under trapdoors to be accesible from outside the house, so you can fill the cellar with the potato harvest right from the tractor. People would get their basements filled to have enough potatoes to make it through the winter. Another cultural fact: "Kartoffelferien" (="potato holidays") are still used by some elderly to describe the school holidays around october, because children needed to help with the potato harvest around that time.
  • hnbad 2y ago
    Yes, they can be substituted but they're definitely a staple in good German Hausmannskost. Maybe not so much in the South: Swabia subsists almost entirely on Spätzle noodles and Bavarians seem to prefer various kinds of Knödel. But a good Rhineland Sauerbraten for example would normally be served with potatoes and a good Bauernomelette demands some crispy fried potato slices as well. Semmelknödel (but also often offered alongside potato dumplings) are a more common sight at special occasions or buffets. Many a young family's weekly rotation features spinach, fried eggs and potato mash alongside fish sticks, fried potatos with fried eggs and onions are a popular hearty lunch or late breakfast, and cooked potatos or mash are the default addition to some meat or sausage to the point a common microwave TV dinner still consists of Nuremberg sausages, sauerkraut and mash.
    • micwag 2y ago
      > Yes, they can be substituted but they're definitely a staple in good German Hausmannskost. Maybe not so much in the South: Swabia subsists almost entirely on Spätzle noodles and Bavarians seem to prefer various kinds of Knödel. While the classic northern "Salzkartoffeln" are basically non existent in Swabia, potatoes in general play a big role in traditional Swabian cuisine. Whether its "Schupfnudeln" (finger noodles), as salad, Knödel, fried potatoe slices, Hitzkuchen/Blootz/Dinnete (Pizza with potatoes instead of tomatoe/cheese), Kachelessen/Griebaschnecken/Schlanganger (various potatoe and milk dishes), Gaisburger Marsch (stew), "sour eggs" (potatoes and eggs in a vinegar sauce). But unfortunately most of those dishes are not really cooked anymore. (For "sour eggs" thats a good thing, this tasteless sour graybrown dish can die in hell for all I care.)
      • CoastalCoder 2y ago
        In 2012 I was on the Tyrol valley near the Austrian Italian border, and IIRC the small restaurant we visited had potato pizza on its menu.
      • 9dev 2y ago
        As a fellow southern German - is it really surprising? Pretty much all traditional dishes are just so heavy, there’s only about two days of fall when I’m in the mood to eat anything like that. Also, pretty much any traditional German main course is meat-based.
  • morsch 2y ago
    I tried to find some data, and I have to say I'm surprised how low potato consumption is in Germany[1]: 59 kg per capita per year. Metaphorically unfocusing my eyes while looking at the linked map, that seems like it's about average for Europe. Another, more recent, statistic[2] bears this out, 54 kg, and also has surprising (to me) details. Of those 54 kg, fully two-thirds -- 38 kg -- are processed potatoes (the article names potato chips/crisps, ready-to-eat potato salad and, of course, fries) and just 16 kg are "real" fresh potatoes. Finally, things used to be different[3]: in 1950, the per-capita consumption was 186 kg! [1] https://landgeist.com/2021/12/21/potato-consumption-in-europe/ https://landgeist.com/2021/12/21/potato-consumption-in-europ... attributed to FAO [2] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung/versorgungsbilanzen/kartoffeln https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung/versorgungsbilanzen... German dept. of agriculture [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/539799/per-capita-consumption-of-potatoes-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/539799/per-capita-consum... it doesn't say, but I doubt people were eating a lot of potato chips in 1950 Germany
    • wheels 2y ago
      A contributing factor in that is that Germans eat less and less traditionally German food. I'm wondering if fries are counted among the processed potatoes (I suspect so), as those are seemingly – like in many places – the most commonly observed form of potatoes.
    • weitendorf 2y ago
      The fact that per-capita potato consumption was so much higher in 1950 tracks with what I've observed from german-american areas in the US. I lived in wisconsin for a bit and grew up as/around a lot of German-Americans, and we consumed way more potatoes than seems typical compared to eg San Franciscans. Potato salad, potato pancakes, potato soup, potato dumplings, german fried potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes (the latter two not being exclusively german but much more consumed), potatoes au gratin/scalloped potatoes +/- ham (I guess has some French origin as well). Also notable is that a lot of dishes that seem popular in Germany when I went aren't very common in the US in german-american areas as far as I can tell. Spaetzle is basically just a novelty, and I never see schnitzel per-se, but we do have equivalents like chicken-fried steak. We also basically never use the German name for anything except sauerkraut, bratwurst, and strudels, which to my understanding is because the US heavily de-germanized in WW1.
• icelancer 2y ago
  Yeah, I always find this fact + people saying "America" has no unique food culture to be quite funny in tandem. Of course the United States does have unique food culture beyond that juxtaposition, but still.
  • Footingerm 2y ago
    But its true. Europe has a refined food history even if certain foods are young. There was some type of pizza before and it evolved in what pizza is today. Alone the amount of cheese types is huge. What did the USA invent in comparision? What is specific to USA? Even plenty of typical USA Food was invented in Europe.
    • Almondsetat 2y ago
      What is there to "invent" exactly? First of all, humans invent recipes based on the locally available raw foods, nothing special about that. Secondly, humans reinvent the same recipes time after time because we are all the same. Each culture invents their own stuffed dumplings, flat bread with toppings, etc. and they believe it's soooo unique and local
      • darkwater 2y ago
        Your strokes are too broad. Obviously different groups of humans in different times and locations are going to invent similar foods. But, for example speaking of flat bread, how you actually execute it and the differences in texture, thickness, crunchiness, what you put on top of it and what order can make two dishes that are the same macro idea but end up as two completely different things.
        • Almondsetat 2y ago
          Cooking something for 15 minutes more or 15 minutes less can cause massive differences in texture and taste, and we are not even talking about the potentially big differences that having slightly different ingredients can cause.
• PestoDiRucola 2y ago
  > Nor was there corn for polenta Before corn, polenta was made with barley: https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/ancient-roman-barley-polenta/ https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/a...
  • antisthenes 2y ago
    In my mind, polenta was just another word for porridge, which means it could be made with literally any available grain. It's just a roughly milled grain, boiled until a certain consistency.
• fuzztester 2y ago
  AFAIK India didn't have corn either. Like chilies and potatoes and a few other plants, it came from the Americas.
  • steveoscaro 2y ago
    And the list goes on of the food products that only existed in the Americas - chocolate, coffee, hot peppers. But of course it goes both ways. I just had traditional breakfast in an isolated Zapotec village in Mexico. But of course the cheese wasn’t part of it until the Spaniards arrived.
    • wincy 2y ago
      You’re off on coffee, a few months ago I too assumed it came from the Americas because it grows so well here, but was surprised to learn it’s actually an old world thing. https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee
      • asveikau 2y ago
        The name coming from Arabic is a big hint. And then the species called C. arabica.
      • fuzztester 2y ago
        Coffee came from Ethiopian highlands, according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
  • umeshunni 2y ago
    Article on Indian food before modern European contact: https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-columbus/ https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-colum...
    • triceratops 2y ago
      The article focuses quite a bit on asfoetida, but makes no mention of peppercorns which are native to India. When Europeans sailed to India for spices, they weren't going an asfoetida or turmeric run. It was pepper they sought (and I guess cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves too - though some of those might be from Indonesia idk). I always assumed pre-Columbian Indian food had fieriness and heat from pepper (bite into a whole peppercorn - it's plenty fiery), so there was a pre-existing cultural affinity for that flavor. This to me explained the rapid assimilation of chilli peppers into virtually every regional Indian cuisine.
• annexrichmond 2y ago
  India also didn’t have tomatoes until it was brought over by the Portuguese, at least this is what I learned in my travels there.
  • teractiveodular 2y ago
    It's even harder to imagine India without chillies.
    • trueismywork 2y ago
      India used black pepper before chillies so things were just as hot. Just a different kind of hot.
      • anthonypasq 2y ago
        putting an extreme amount of black pepper in a dish does not make it unbearably spicy, it just makes it taste way too much like pepper. theres definitely no way black pepper can be "just as hot" as chillies
        • trueismywork 2y ago
          You haven't used really hot black peppers then. Also I say black peppers but also people used cloves and bay leaves. It is a different spice so yeah, it doesn't burn the tongue but just heats up your body.
• veunes 2y ago
  The history of global cuisines is a testament to the dynamic nature of food culture
• nytesky 2y ago
  Didn't Italy get noodles from Asia relatively recently
  • lmm 2y ago
    No. Common myth. The Romans had pasta.
    • lolinder 2y ago
      I'm willing to believe it, but do you have a citation? Google is useless here, too many results for non-ancient Rome, but when I can find one that is properly about the ancients they all claim the same thing: the Romans had things that could be considered pasta-like (pancakes used for a sort of lasagna dish) but those were not actually the ancestors of Italian noodles.
      • rodgerd 2y ago
        Roger II found pasta factories when he seized control of Sicily: https://italicsmag.com/2020/05/29/a-brief-history-of-pasta/ https://italicsmag.com/2020/05/29/a-brief-history-of-pasta/
        • lolinder 2y ago
          Again, though: did the various dough concoctions turn into pasta the way that we think of it today, or did modern pasta come from the East? Boiled dough balls and pancakes are a far cry from the thin, stretchy, glutenous noodles that we call pasta.
• raldi 2y ago
  Don’t forget chocolate and (though it wasn’t a New World plant) vanilla.
• jrochkind1 2y ago
  Rather than being peculiarly modern, I think probably most cultures have always been much less stable and more changing than we tend to assume, even before modernity.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  It seems Christopher Columbus did more for gastronomy than thousands of chefs.
• Affric 2y ago
  Tomatoes, maize, chillies, and potatoes (3 are nightshade) and came during the Colombian exchange. Basil has been used across Eurasia for far longer. Certainly a lot earlier than 3 centuries ago. For Millenia in the Mediterranean.
  • jamincan 2y ago
    Tomatoes took awhile to take hold, with it not really taking off until the 19th century. I've heard it explained as due to a general distrust of 'exotic' foods and vegetables generally at that time and a belief that it was poisonous and would sap your vitality.
    • Affric 2y ago
      There were lots of similar folk beliefs, such as diseases being related to the resemblance to the food you ate. E.g. potatoes looking like tumours therefore giving you tumours. In Germany they were popularised by Frederick the great putting a cursory guard around a field of them and then letting peasants steal them. From memory tomatoes were for some time grown as ornament in Europe before they were commonly part of cuisine.