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My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His vi
by rdedev 3mo ago
My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe
- zulux 3mo agoWhen my Korean friends tell me that my cuisine isn't spicy enough: Well... let's talk about that spice.
- pfdietz 3mo agoHave you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.
- culi 3mo agoIt really transformed Europe too. Europe's basically a story of famine after famine until they got access to the potato. I don't know if any other technology has saved as many European lives as the potato Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.
- gwerbin 3mo ago1300 AD?! Did the Polynesians bring chickens with them? I knew about the sweet potatoes, but the chickens are a whole different manner.
- pfdietz 3mo agoChickens descend from jungle fowl, which were carried out into the Pacific from SE Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl
- culi 3mo agoYes exactly. We have chicken remains in Chile that are dated between 1304 and 1424. And we even have DNA confirmation from those bones that link them to modern Polynesian chicken populations. The tailless, blue-egged Araucana breed is still around today and is thought to predate Columbus
- markdown 3mo agoAsk a 5yr old. They've watched Moana a dozen times and can name a chicken character.
- 20after4 3mo agoHis other book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus"¹ is also excellent. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
- culi 3mo agoPotatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins/zucchinis/most squashes, cassava, the common bean (including pinto, black, kidney, etc), cassava, sunflowers, avocado, etc all didn't exist in European kitchens until the 1500s (and not really widespread until at least the 1600s). Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.
- gwerbin 3mo agoCoffee is another interesting example in the other direction, it's so often associated with places like Colombia, Java, etc that people don't realize it's only native to Ethiopia, and that the majority of coffee consumed around the world today descends from one specific genetic lineage that was cultivated for a few centuries in Yemen.
- ignoramous 3mo agoErstwhile seafaring powers went to war over trade routes for these. Surprising it isn't that well known.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 3mo agoMost of that I knew, but I was surprised at the beans. I thought beans were a standard medieval fare. It turned out that these were fava beans, which stem from the Old World.