[bobthepanda]

I think what is so interesting is also, if you peel back the curtain, most recipes have standardized at a fairly recent point in their national mythos, depending on how long that is.

Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like

* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century

* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century

* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century

* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)

Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.

[pratik661]

Also, motorized blades and grinders were revolutionary for the categories of recipes they unlocked

[throw0101a]

> exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)

For more on this see the book 1493:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...

Many folks are probably familiar with what happened in Europe post-1492, but there's a whole bunch of stuff on the Pacific side of the Americas as well.

[rsynnott]

The reference carbonara, for instance, appears to have existed in ~its current form for _under a century_.

[zahlman]

> or example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.

What era of history are we talking about here? Would it have been transported as flour, or ground locally?

[bobthepanda]

While I don't have the exact details of transport and whatnot, much of that rice came from the Carolinas https://inlandrice.charlestoncounty.org/economics.html

Generally speaking, rice is a lot higher yield per acre, and also, the east coast doesn't have particularly good wheat growing.

[foolfoolz]

i think there’s another component to this that most food sucked. your daily food was probably bad because it had few seasonings. it was likely starch (rice/bread), and stew. you don’t need a recipe for soup, it’s boil water and throw in whatever vegetables you have on hand. maybe meat if you had it

[MeetingsBrowser]

Recipes go back millennia, and seasonings were also common, but varied by region. It’s easy to grow your own herbs a, or even forage for some things.

I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.

[mjhay]

Recipes were the province of the wealthy. The average person would have had a very repetitive, bland, and potentially malnourishing diet. They might have had some herbs or even foraged like you say, that still is very bland and boring compared to what we’re used to.

[retrac]

From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.

[grebc]

The very poor far outnumber the wealthy.

[bobthepanda]

one thing to note is that while they may have consumed it they probably weren't making it. Particularly for urban dwellers, kitchens were very rudimentary if you even had one.

[red-iron-pine]

up until maybe 200 years ago famines were a genuine and consistent threat even to places like Europe.

food wouldn't just have sucked, in many cases all you could eat would be some dried grain boiled to porridge, or the handful of semi-mouldy veggies that made it through winter months -- and many would often be lucky to even have that

[basch]

Beer purity 1516

[mc32]

Pad Thai was an invention to unite the country and forge an identity in the face of Chinese influence. After WWII it was popularized because it was cheap and thus able to feed a post war population.