Edible History

The Origins of foods and beverages, amazing historical facts about the foods and drinks, famous people diets and eating habits and many more related stories

[Edible History @Jaampix6]

Paella is a Valencian word that means frying pan. The dish takes its name from the wide, shallow traditional pan used to cook the dish on an open fire. Paella Valenciana started as a practical meal for hardworking people, utilizing local ingredients and simple cooking methods. From 15th century that rice became a staple in in Spain it was customary for cooks to combine rice with vegetables, beans, and dry cod, providing an acceptable meal. Living standards rose with the sociological changes of the late 19th century in Spain, giving rise to gatherings and outings in the countryside. This led to a change in paella's ingredients, as well, using instead rabbit, chicken, duck, and sometimes snails. The dish became so popular that in 1840, a local Spanish newspaper first used the word paella to refer to the recipe rather than the pan itself. From then It is one of the best-known dishes in Spanish cuisine.

[Edible History @Jaampix6]

One of the most popular curries in the southern United States was the Anglo-Indian dish country captain chicken, which many believed was invented in America. According to one explanation of its origin, a sea captain who sailed into Charleston harbor with a shipload of spices from India was so graciously entertained by the city’s hostesses that he repaid their hospitality by teaching their cooks to make a chicken curry, which was then named after him.

[Edible History @Jaampix6]

In Medieval Europe, Catholic monks would often undergo "beer fasts" during the forty days of Lent. They ate no food, getting calories only from beer, which they called "liquid bread."

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

A unique Old-Babylonian vase in Akkadian cuneiform script, describing the dredging of the Tigris by King Sin-Iddinam of Larsa in Babylon, Mesopotamia, was created around 1848 BC.

#archaeohistories

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Climate change is changing the flavor of French wine; as the records going back 700 years, show that Burgundy’s wine grapes have been feeling the heat of the past three decades :

The summer of 1540 CE, was burning hot in the vine-covered hills of Burgundy, France - so hot as to be “almost unbearable,” according to one written account from the time.

In fact, it was hot all across Europe that year. In the Alps, glaciers melted, their snouts retreating up steep-sided valleys. Fires burned from France to Poland. And in the wine country of central France, the grapes withered to raisins on the vine, so sugary the wine made from them was syrupy and extra-alcoholic.

Normally, winemakers harvested grapes at the very end of September or early October. But that year, they had to scurry to get overripe grapes off the vine weeks earlier than usual.

Now, a nearly 700-year-long record of harvest dates from the town of Beaune, in Burgundy, shows that early harvest dates like the one from 1540 CE, are now par for the course, thanks to climate change. Scientists and historians stitched together a record of grape harvest dates going back to 1354 CE. They found that air temperatures have warmed so much and especially in the last 30 years, that grapes are now harvested almost two weeks before their historical norm.

“We can clearly see the reaction of the grapes to the rise in temperature,” says Thomas Labbé, an historian at the University of Leipzig.

Winemakers know the growth stages intimately: the look of the vines before they bud; the look of the vines as they mature over long seasons; and the fat, sugary, fragrant curve of the grapes when they’re ready to be made into wine.

That harvest point is crucial. Too long on the vine and the grapes have too much sugar in them, meaning the wine will be more alcoholic, not the subtle feel most winemakers in the region care for. Too long, and the acids that give wine some of its feel in the mouth may disintegrate. Not long enough, and they might not have developed the right balance of fragrant chemicals that give the wine its characteristic flavors.

Winemakers keep careful track of harvest dates, with some records stretching back to the Middle Ages. In 1800s, scientists and historians realized that those careful records could be used to keep track of how the climate in different parts of Europe has changed over time.

“Grape harvest date records are the longest records of phenology in Europe,” says Elizabeth Wolkovich, a biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies wine and climate relationships. “We have these hundreds of years of records of what the summer temp was like, and we can use them like a thermometer.”

Grape harvest dates reflect the temperature the grapes have felt over the course of the growing season, from about April until they’re picked. If the spring and summer are hot, the grapes mature faster and need to be picked sooner. If they're cool, the opposite is true.

Climate historians started to pull together ancient information from other sources, too. They matched up the patterns in the grape harvest data with records made from tree rings and the length of glaciers in the Alps. They used records like those to figure out that much of central Europe warmed up during the Medieval Warm Period, from around 900-1300 CE. It had cooled down during the Little Ice Age, from about 15th-19th Centuries CE.

The historians saw that over the past few hundred years, temperatures wobbled around, skewing warm for short stretches and cooling down in others. But overall, climate rocked up and down around a fairly consistent average value, until recently.

📷 : Winemakers in Europe have kept careful track of harvest dates for centuries. Nowadays, wine grapes are ready to pick weeks earlier than they were in the past.
(illustration by J Williamson)

© National Geographic

#archaeohistories

[Trimontium Trust @TrimontiumTrust]

In Ostia near Rome, the wharehouse of the Roman officials who were in charge of weighing wheat (Horrea of the Mensores) is to be found.
The floor of the Horrea of the Mensores displays a black and white #mosaic, showing the activity of the Mensores, their roles and tools.

[🖤 Roger 🖤 @ergue27]

"Départ pour la pêche", del pintor francés Jacques-Eugène Feyen (1815-1908).

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

A 3100 year old jar full of burnt figs strung together by strings, was found in Ekron, Israel :

Archaeological discoveries never cease to amaze us, offering glimpses into ancient civilizations and their way of life. One such remarkable find recently occurred in Ekron, Israel, where a 3100 year-old jar filled with burnt figs, intricately strung together with strings, was unearthed. This discovery sheds light on culinary practices and cultural traditions of 12th Century BC, in the region.

The excavation took place in Ekron, an ancient Philistine city located in modern-day Israel. The Philistines were known for their distinctive culture, which included unique pottery styles and culinary traditions. The 3100 year-old jar, a testament to their way of life, was discovered intact and buried deep within the archaeological site. Inside the jar, archaeologists made a truly astonishing discovery; a collection of burnt figs. These figs, once an important part of the ancient Philistine diet, were not just loosely placed in the jar but were intricately strung together using strings. This arrangement suggests that these figs may have been stored for later use or possibly even as a form of offering or ritualistic practice.

Find holds immense significance for researchers and historians. Firstly, it provides insights into the dietary habits of the Philistines during 12th Century BC. Figs were a staple in their diet, and the practice of stringing them together hints at their culinary techniques and food preservation methods. Secondly, burnt figs and their presentation within the jar could be linked to ancient rituals or offerings. Such discoveries help us better understand the religious and cultural practices of this ancient civilization.

Ekron fig jar is not an isolated find but is part of a broader archaeological context. It joins a collection of artifacts that have been unearthed in this region over the years, offering a comprehensive picture of the ancient city’s history, culture, and interactions with neighboring civilizations. The discovery of a 3100 year-old jar filled with burnt figs in Ekron, Israel, is a testament to ongoing revelations that archaeology brings to light. This find offers a glimpse into the culinary traditions and, perhaps, spiritual practices of Philistines during 12th Century BC. As researchers continue to analyze and study this remarkable artifact, it promises to enrich our understanding of ancient civilizations and their way of life.

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

#archaeohistories

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Turkish pide bread is a traditional flatbread known for its fluffy texture and ease of preparation. It requires no kneading, making it a straightforward choice for home cooks.

[📹 karadenizyusufeli]
https://t.co/wIMROupYp0

[Angela Arte @arte_angela]

RICHARD NORRIS BROCKE
Pintor Estadounidense
1847-1920
Óleo s/ Lienzo - 119,38 x 197,16
National Gallery of Art, Washington, EE.UU
"Visita Pastoral" - 1881
.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Baklava; a delicious phyllo pastry popular in Middle Eastern countries. Its supposed origins are Turkish, dating to Byzantine Empire (or even further), though many cultures claim it for their own.

Origins of baklava date back to ancient times, around 8th Century BC, people in the Assyrian Empire, which spread across parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Türkiye, arranged unleavened flatbreads in layers, with chopped nuts in between, to be enjoyed during special events. Centuries later, Ancient Greek and Roman “placenta cake” was a dish consisting of many layers of dough, filled with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. However, earliest reference to Baklava is in a poem by mystic Kaygusuz Abdal, who lived in first half of 15th Century CE,” writes Mary Isin, an Ottoman food historian, in her book, Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts.

Historically, treat was saved for festive occasions due to skill required to make it, as well as high price of key ingredients such as honey, sugar and nuts. In Ottoman times, Baklava was an “almost sacred” part of Ramadan, Isin explains. Beginning in 1520 CE, during this holy month, Ottoman sultan would famously gift it in massive quantities to his most elite soldiers, Janissaries, in what was known as Baklava Procession. “Hundreds of trays of baklava, one for every 10 janissaries, were baked in palace kitchens, tied in cloths to protect them from dust and arrayed in Second Court,” Isin writes. “Until Janissary Corps was liquidated in 1826 CE, one and a half months after Baklava Procession, this event remained a popular annual spectacle.” Ottoman Christians baked baklava for Lent, with some using up to 40 layers of phyllo dough to represent 40 days of Lent and others using 33 layers to represent 33 years of Christ’s life. Jews across empire began serving baklava on holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Purim as well.

Very few other dishes have crossed religions as much as baklava. Perhaps oldest example of this, Isin writes in an article titled “Adam and Eve’s Wheat Porridge,” is an ancient, boiled wheat dessert known as ashure, or “Noah’s pudding,” prepared slightly differently by each ethno-religious group. “Dishes of boiled wheat sweetened variously with sugar, fruit molasses and dried fruits have for centuries been shared by people of different faiths in Turkey,” Isin says, “eaten in varying forms under different names by Muslims, Christians and Jews.” Still, no other food combines this cross-cultural significance with enduring popularity of baklava.

Baklava’s reputation as a dish of importance also meant that it was spread far and wide by bureaucrats along trade routes and pilgrimages during zenith of Ottoman Empire in 16th Century CE. This made dessert a staple across Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, from Algeria to Afghanistan. As a result, numerous regional variations have emerged over centuries, often based on locally available ingredients. “Gaziantep region famous for pistachios,” across Türkiye, others began to follow suit. In Greece, on other hand, walnuts became nut of choice, with cinnamon used to flavor filling. Armenian “paklava” filled with walnuts and spiced with cinnamon and cloves, and Cypriot version often uses almonds as well as walnuts.

Syrup used also varies greatly from country to country. In Algeria, syrup is typically flavored with orange-blossom water, whereas in Iran, rosewater and cardamom are preferred. A honey and lemon syrup is go-to in Greece.

Today, baklava forms such an important part of culinary identity of so many places that people sometimes dispute claims to its origins. From its roots along Mediterranean, it is now enjoyed around the world, by people missing tastes of home and by others all same.

© Smithsonian Magazine

#archaeohistories

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Cardamom is one of the oldest & most exotic spices and rightly deserves the name “Queen of Spices”. It belongs to the ginger family. The use of this spice dates back to at least 4000 years. Chanakya’s Arthashatra, written in 4th Century BC, has discussed explicitly cardamom as "A green pearl found in the banks of the river Periyar in the South West mountains" they used to call is "Chaurnayam." Amarakosha - a vocabulary of Sanskrit roots written by "Amarasimha," a Buddhist from the 8th Century AD, has mentioned different names of cardamom. There has been mention of cardamom used as a medicinal ingredient in many Ayurveda books since 1000 BC.

Originally, cardamom grew wildly along the Western Ghats in South India. This region even to this day is known as Cardamom Hills. It was a native produce of the forest and was considered as a natural wild plant, which was harvested by the tribal community during their commute through the jungle for food. It was sun-dried and traded villagers for cloth and salt. The villagers near to the forests bought it to merchants who took it to the port and traded it to maritime sailors who arrived at different ports on the Malabar coast.

Outside India, the uses of cardamom have been recorded since the Pyramid age of Egypt. They used it as a medicinal ingredient, a mouth freshener and even as an ingredient for the oils used for the mummification process. Some accounts state the mentioning of aromatic oils in the Bible is considered to be prepared with the base as cardamom. Cardamom reached the Romans and the Greek via Arabia. Amomum and Kardamum refer to the cardamom that came from the southern Hills of modern day India.

#archaeohistories

[Rachel Atherton-Charvat @athertoncharvat]

This beautiful #Roman jug would have been fashionable tableware c. 1700 years ago in the city of Augusta Treverorum.Perhaps used for wine this elegant light green vessel has cobalt trailing around the neck with delicate threads descending around the body.(1/2)
📷2023
#Archaeology

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

İznik Ware, in Islamic ceramics, a school of Turkish pottery making that flowered throughout 16th and on into 17th Century CE. There may have been potteries at İznik, where there were deposits of suitable  clay, as early as the 12th Century CE, but it was not until late 15th Century CE, that pottery making came into its own in Türkiye. The chief centre of production became established in the city of İznik.

In early 16th Century CE, İznik  ware was influenced by the blue and white porcelain of  Ming-dynasty China and by  Persian wares. İznik ware was soft and sandy, being of grayish white clay covered with a usually white thin slip (a mixture of clay and water). Flat dishes were the commonest shapes, but bowls, jugs, and flower vases were also made. They were painted with stylized and symmetrical designs of flowers, leaves, and fruits, along with abstract linear motifs based on these natural forms and others such as fish scales. By mid-16th Century CE, the range of colours used in the decoration had expanded from blue and white to include  turquoise, several shades of green, and purple and black. Red had become a frequently used colour by the late 16th century. The quality of İznik ware declined in the 17th century, and by 1800 manufacture had ceased.

The small town of Iznik in north-west Anatolia, Türkiye; has given its name to some of the most accomplished ceramics produced in the Islamic Middle East.

In late 15th Century CE, potters there specialised in modest earthenware imitations of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. But in 1460s or 1470s, under patronage of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, they began to manufacture bowls, dishes and other pieces of fritware that were elegant in shape and decoration, and often very large.

At first, the decoration of this new ware was also blue and white, although the designs were based on the highly stylised plant forms, knots and other patterns favoured by the Ottoman court. By 1520s, connection with the court had weakened, and the potters were working mainly for the market. They expanded the range of colours and introduced new patterns from a wide range of sources. Small sprays of tullps and other recognisable flowers were a common motif, but from the 1550s these were replaced by compositions on a larger scale. Many were orginally developed for tilework. Tiles of high quality were decorated in red, green and tones of blue on a white ground. Dishes, bottles and other vessels had similar decoration on white or coloured grounds.

📷 : A iznik ceramic vase (1540 CE), now displayed at Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

#archaeohistories

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

India is home to many precious aromatic products and has long been known in West as a source of perfumes. In medieval European imagination, India was redolent with spectacular aromatics because it was close to Garden of Paradise. Perhaps surprisingly then, within India people have long appreciated exotic scented materials, often looking beyond the subcontinent to remote regions and islands for their version of the land of spices. World of Indian perfumery was never static, and the range of local and imported aromatics available in India expanded from ancient times until around 500 AD. Indian perfumers, arguably, had access to more aromatics than anyone else on earth.

Earliest texts we possess from ancient India, the vast collection of texts called the Vedas contain hymns, ritual instructions and philosophical speculation, dating from around 1200 BC, through the later 1st Millennium BC. Vedas mention only a few aromatics: flower garlands along with guggulu resin (a type of myrrh) and costus root. Guggulu, burned as incense, was said to be the flesh of the fire god Agni, so central to these ancient rituals, and costus root was also said to be a god. Guggulu is still burned in Hindu rituals today and is arguably one of the oldest continually used aromatics in India. The aromatics of the Vedas were probably sourced from within South Asia and Western regions for guggulu, and costus from mountainous regions in the North. At this early period, the classic aromatic palette of Indian perfumery had yet to develop.

In such texts as the great epic poem called the Ramayana, we read of sandalwood and agarwood, and already these scented woods were highly valued. The evidence suggests they were ground to a paste that people smeared on their bodies and on other things such as weapons. Sometimes, woods were burned, as in a cremation pyre. A text on statecraft called Arthashastra that is about two thousand years old lists several varieties of these woods, called by exotic names, that are stored in royal treasury. Clearly, these woods were valuable and durable commodities, as they still are today.

Classic list of Indian aromatics seen in literature and perfumery, sandalwood, agarwood, camphor, musk and saffron is established in early Centuries AD. Along with cloves, nutmegs, cubebs and frankincense, these were effectively “spices” for people in India. Like spices in Europe they were rare, precious, and in many cases imported through long-distance trade. India was unusually well placed to trade in all these materials, located right in middle of Southeast Asia (agarwood, camphor, cubebs, nutmegs), Himalayas and China (musk) and Arabia (frankincense). Saffron came from Kashmir and Kashmiri’s have long been proud to produce this precious aromatic “spice.” And in Indian poetry sandalwood was said to come from mountains in south, where the trees were filled with venomous snakes, a popular metaphor for a tantalizing mixture of good and evil, so a king, for example, might be compared to a sandalwood tree, admired and important yet surrounded by toxic followers.

These precious, mostly imported substances were used along with more local products such as jatamansi, costus root and vetiver (patchouli is strangely absent in early periods). These too were valued in perfumery for their scent but were not as precious as the exotics, such as Chinese musk and camphor from Borneo. Dozens of types of flowers such as many jasmine varieties of Sanskrit literature were also cultivated for their scent, though there was no distillation in early periods. Often used fresh, as garlands, the way to preserve these fragrances was by an ancient form of enfleurage using sesame seeds. The sesame was stored with piles of fresh flowers, replaced day after day until the seeds were infused with perfume, and then the seeds were crushed to extract oil, a process that is still used for making hair oil in India today.

© National Geographic

#archaeohistories

[Edible History @Jaampix6]

The ancient Greeks used saffron for its aromatic properties and for its color properties. The majority of the population of ancient Greece had black hair, and because the favorite hair color was blond, they used yellow dyes to dye their hair. They used a mixture of saffron and potassium water.
In Greece, frescoes depicting the saffron harvest were also found, dating from 1600-1500 BC, such as the famous fresco in the palace of Knossos on the island of Crete.

[Edible History @Jaampix6]

@historyinmemes Robert Cornelius was an American photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. His daguerreotype self-portrait taken in 1839 is generally accepted as the first known photographic portrait of a person taken in the United States.

[HOW THINGS WORK @HowThingsWork_]

Inside the factory: How pasta is shaped

[HOW THINGS WORK @HowThingsWork_]

Robot fruit sorting. This clever machine fills the individual boxes based on size & weights of each apple. 🍎🦾🍏

[Trimontium Trust @TrimontiumTrust]

A two handled #Roman silver drinking cup from the @GettyMuseum collection, dated to 25BC-AD100. The scenes are from Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey & show Odysseus in the underworld, consulting with the ghost of Teiresias—the only one who can tell him how to return home to Ithaca