Well I would give a medieval peasant some spaghetti.
1. They don’t have forks. I would hand them a fork with it and see what they do.
2. They don’t have tomatoes. This is something they can never experience again
3. I would let them keep the plate because it’s a nice plate and I think they’d like it
i love it when a post comes with its own FAQs
what the fuck do you mean they didn't have tomatoes
Tomatoes are not native to Afroeurasia and generally wouldn’t have been available on that continent before the Colombian exchange. When we refer to medieval peasants we’re usually referring to the poor of Europe and west Asia between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. A time before the so-called age of exploration and colonization brought food such as tomatoes, maize, and potatoes to Afroeurasia and domesticated animals such as pigs and chickens to the Americas. European cuisine of the poor and rich alike before the Colombian exchange would still have been tasty with their wide selection of game meat, herbs, vegetables, and grains, but tomatoes would not have been available to them and that’s why I want to give a medieval peasant a plate of Italian-American style spaghetti with marinara sauce just like dad used to make
wait so. italy? i guess it’s not called afroeurasitaly, but…so “italian” food used to not have tomatoes? until they came from the americas? and they they what, decided “hey let’s just rebuild our national identity around these tasty christmas tree ornaments”? centuries of italy were lasagna-free and i’m just supposed to accept this
They had lasagna. It just didn’t look like what we think of lasagna today. It was more like layers of flat noodles with spices and cheese on a plate that you ate with your hands rather than a baked dish.
If you look at ancient Roman food there’s certain things we’d recognize as “Italian” like olive oil or fermented fish sauce or cheese but the flavor profile is completely different and pasta isn’t anywhere to be found. They also had herbs and spices that have since become unpopular or even gone extinct.
A lot of things we view as unmovable and unchanging about certain culture’s cuisines are incredibly recent developments. Modern Indian cuisine for example can be traced back to a singular guy in the 16th century. And these days lard is considered to be integral to making tamales but that wasn’t used until the Spanish brought over pigs and cows.
Food culture is something that can change very rapidly. Sometimes within a single generation. People generally use what they have available and what’s available can change at a moment’s notice.
This feels like watching a clown get questioned by the crowd before they pull out a history textbook and proceed to whack the audience repeatedly with it
That sums up pretty well what it’s like to be me yeah
Ok but the forks? How did they not have forks?
They had hands and spoons and sometimes sticks. Forks are a Byzantine thing. Folks in Western Europe thought they were weird and wanted nothing to do with them.
The tomato came with the Jews to Italy (specifically Livorno) when they escaped the spanish inquisition en mass in 1492 (choice of death or conversion). Since they were banned from guilds in Christian Europe trading was one of the few jobs available to them, and so they traded it there.
