That is an amazing read, thank you for sharing. Not often you see a landfill for welfare recipients turned into a holy place that the popes visit and wealthy people store their wine
hedgehog 13 hours ago [-]
I keep hoping I'll be able to get my hands on some silphium to see what it's like.
keiferski 14 hours ago [-]
The majority of Italian food doesn’t actually use tomatoes. That impression is mostly because internationally-known Italian foods tend to use tomatoes (pizza for example.)
alkyon 8 hours ago [-]
Pizza like its predecessor Focaccia (panis focacius in Roman times) was initially tomato-less. Even today many pizzerias offer pizza bianca in their menus
That being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.
card_zero 14 hours ago [-]
Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth.
Although it should be noted that modern turnip varieties are significantly more flavorful and sweet than pre-Columbian exchange era turnips. The old varieties were usually very bland so it didn’t take much for another tuber to displace it.
jasonwatkinspdx 8 hours ago [-]
My understanding is a lot of northern Italian recipes are basically the same as their pre colonial versions, like ragu bianco.
burgreblast 14 hours ago [-]
melanzana aka Aubergine aka eggplant
ginko 14 hours ago [-]
Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.
On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
In that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me).
Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
technothrasher 7 hours ago [-]
> if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me
Having grown up on plenty of both wild venison and farmed cattle, they are pretty different, not to mention that different types of venison are also quite different from each other. So I'm not sure I would consider venison and beef interchangeable simply by familiarity. White tailed deer and gemsbok, specifically, I find the best tasting and much better than beef.
jasonwatkinspdx 9 hours ago [-]
> On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus.
Not at all. Many pre columbian foods remain popular today, like tamales. Corn, beans, squash, fish, nuts, and tropical fruit were all staple foods in pre contact Mesoamerica. Central American islanders were big on grilling fish over coals.
I don't think it was a miserably plain diet by any means.
lava_pidgeon 13 hours ago [-]
Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potato
ginko 13 hours ago [-]
I'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable.
Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.
mmooss 12 hours ago [-]
> no dairy
They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
AlotOfReading 12 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.
mmooss 9 hours ago [-]
That makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it.
I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.
AlotOfReading 7 hours ago [-]
Not going to get into the social darwinism stuff. We can empirically measure an apparent selective pressure for lactase persistence, but it's an open question without clear answers what the factors driving that are.
I think you're missing why milk is useful though. Dairy allows you to take resources that aren't calorically useful like grasslands and turn them into food. You can consume it either immediately or later via preservation techniques like cheese. Even if you consume it immediately, milk is a seasonal product.
Dairy also isn't the only way of turning unusable resources into food though. You can eat the animal, for example. That's less efficient if you're limited to a single species, but cattle and other large livestock suitable for the scale of milk production you're talking about are so phenomenally inefficient that you're likely better off if you consume more efficient animals instead.
jjtheblunt 11 hours ago [-]
no beef? bison were ubiquitous, though.
mmooss 13 hours ago [-]
The paper on which the article is based:
González Carretero L, Lucquin A, Robson HK, McLaughlin TR, Dolbunova E, Lundy J, et al. (2026) Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLoS One 21(3): e0342740.
> The combined application of microscopy techniques and lipid residue analysis to the study of foodcrusts from HGF [hunter-gatherer-fisher] pottery vessels has proved a successful approach ...
In academic research, what happens with unsuccessful approaches? I'm sure, like people in other fields, at some point you pull the plug and 'unsuccessful' is really defined as, 'stopped without success'. At some point the startup goes bankrupt, funders give up, the talent leaves, etc. ...
Research is by definition about breaking new ground, so you can't really know what you'll get. But what kind of risk is accepted and for how long? And who are the decision-makers - the researcher (of course), but also the talent? The institution? Funders? Also, at what point does it damage your reputation to continue?
One professor I know told me 'I submitted a title and abstract to this conference, and now I need to figure out how I'm going to do the research'. Maybe with enough experience, you have a good feel for it.
Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
That being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.
https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...
This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix?wprov=sfti1
On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
Having grown up on plenty of both wild venison and farmed cattle, they are pretty different, not to mention that different types of venison are also quite different from each other. So I'm not sure I would consider venison and beef interchangeable simply by familiarity. White tailed deer and gemsbok, specifically, I find the best tasting and much better than beef.
Not at all. Many pre columbian foods remain popular today, like tamales. Corn, beans, squash, fish, nuts, and tropical fruit were all staple foods in pre contact Mesoamerica. Central American islanders were big on grilling fish over coals.
I don't think it was a miserably plain diet by any means.
Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.
They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.
I think you're missing why milk is useful though. Dairy allows you to take resources that aren't calorically useful like grasslands and turn them into food. You can consume it either immediately or later via preservation techniques like cheese. Even if you consume it immediately, milk is a seasonal product.
Dairy also isn't the only way of turning unusable resources into food though. You can eat the animal, for example. That's less efficient if you're limited to a single species, but cattle and other large livestock suitable for the scale of milk production you're talking about are so phenomenally inefficient that you're likely better off if you consume more efficient animals instead.
González Carretero L, Lucquin A, Robson HK, McLaughlin TR, Dolbunova E, Lundy J, et al. (2026) Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLoS One 21(3): e0342740.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> The combined application of microscopy techniques and lipid residue analysis to the study of foodcrusts from HGF [hunter-gatherer-fisher] pottery vessels has proved a successful approach ...
In academic research, what happens with unsuccessful approaches? I'm sure, like people in other fields, at some point you pull the plug and 'unsuccessful' is really defined as, 'stopped without success'. At some point the startup goes bankrupt, funders give up, the talent leaves, etc. ...
Research is by definition about breaking new ground, so you can't really know what you'll get. But what kind of risk is accepted and for how long? And who are the decision-makers - the researcher (of course), but also the talent? The institution? Funders? Also, at what point does it damage your reputation to continue?
One professor I know told me 'I submitted a title and abstract to this conference, and now I need to figure out how I'm going to do the research'. Maybe with enough experience, you have a good feel for it.