Questions tagged [food]

Any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth. Questions with this tag should be about the historical practices of growing, preparing, and eating food, or about the historical origins of modern foods.

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Was rapeseed oil used for cooking before the twentieth century?

The Wikipedia article on rapeseed oil states that it has been in use for thousands of years, starting in India around 4,000 years ago and China and Japan around 2,000 years ago. However, it is unclear ...
0 votes
0 answers
62 views

What is the first documented mention of female period loss (amenorrhea)?

(Hypothalamic) Amenorrhea is defined as the absence of menstruation during the reproductive years of a woman's life. According to physiologists, it's an evolutionary biological mechanism that gets ...
1 vote
1 answer
252 views

Have Chinese (and surrounding) cultures traditionally heated their milk?

I’ve spoken with many middle aged Chinese people who have reported that for as long as they can remember, even growing up on a farm, they would never drink milk, even their own cattle’s, without first ...
1 vote
1 answer
273 views

Traditionally, did Europeans not heat milk before drinking it?

My impression was that before modern pasteurization and refrigeration, most cultures that drank milk considered it a good idea to heat milk before drinking it and so usually did heat milk before ...
24 votes
4 answers
4k views

When and how did classic "Italian" cuisine come to be?

Most people can recognize "Italian" food. Pasta, tomatoes, basil, etc. But many of the plants used in Italian food, didn't actually originate in Italy. Or even anywhere in the Old World. The ...
12 votes
7 answers
4k views

Was there a Japanese Exchange, à la Columbian Exchange?

After the European (re-)discovery of the Americas, there was a widespread transfer of animals, plants, culture, human populations, communicable diseases, technology and ideas between the Americas and ...
14 votes
2 answers
902 views

Was the Granny Smith Apple the first green skinned apple widely propagated?

In my hometown (Eastwood NSW, Australia) we annually celebrate the Granny Smith Apple, which is assumed by many to be the first green apple widely propagated. How true is it that it was the first ...
-3 votes
2 answers
553 views

Were grapes luxurious food in Ancient Rome?

We always see in historical movies that a Roman emperor is sitting on his throne and a concubine feeds him with grapes. My question is that is this historically true? Were grapes so expensive that ...
38 votes
5 answers
10k views

Did active frontiersmen really eat 20,000 calories a day? How does this compare to other highly-active people in recorded history?

I am currently midway through this book, The Company: The Rise And Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire. It is really good. One thing that keeps coming up is the amount of rations needed for each explorer, ...
14 votes
9 answers
27k views

How did societies adapt to using alcohol to make water safer?

I've heard that there were two common methods to disinfecting water in the past: boiling water or turning it into alcohol. Presumably, those in the East relied on boiling water, while those in the ...
0 votes
0 answers
99 views

Which person is Burani named after?

In this article I found two persons as whom Burani (a Middle Eastern dish) is named after: According to Naḵjavānī (p. 145), the term būrānī is derived from the name of Būrān, daughter of Ḥasan b. ...
13 votes
1 answer
2k views

Is "A state that is not able to feed itself...[is not]…a formidable foe" a quote by a historically known figure?

I ran into a quote (or a paraphrase) in a book that I couldn't ever attribute: A state that is not able to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe. While ...
0 votes
1 answer
173 views

What did modern China do with food sold to the state?

I understand that communes, later, "production units", and eventually, households sold food to the state at a set price. If the state wants to pay a lower-than-market price for food, do they ...
9 votes
3 answers
2k views

When was the restaurant "invented" in Europe?

First of all, let me clarify that I am not talking about inns which were located on the roads between major cities; I am talking about real restaurants inside the cities. I gave this some thought and ...
26 votes
6 answers
10k views

Why do old kitchen stoves have circular openings in the upper surface?

As a sidenote to this question: Why do European 19th century kitchen stoves for solid fuels often have circular openings on top? Is the heating more effective if there is no additional metal between ...
9 votes
1 answer
522 views

Does anyone know anything about medieval instant pottage?

Does anyone know anything about medieval instant pottage? Years ago, I saw this in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives episode 1 ( at 14:00). Jones explains pottage and then says there was an instant type of ...
0 votes
3 answers
415 views

Did it really take until 1990 for "Europe"/UK to switch from glass bottles of milk to cartons? [closed]

I came across this weird claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_delivery#Europe By 1975, 94% of milk was in glass bottles, but in 1990, supermarkets started offering plastic and carton containers, ...
2 votes
1 answer
462 views

Has a food taster ever thwarted an assassination attempt?

Important people have been known to employ food tasters to avoid assassination by poisoning. The linked Wikipedia article mentions that Claudius, Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin all ...
2 votes
0 answers
151 views

What was Hunanese cuisine like before chili peppers were imported to China?

Today, chilis are strongly associated with Hunanese cuisine, which is regarded as the spiciest Chinese regional cuisine. However, Chinese recipe books didn't start mentioning chilis until the 1790s, ...
10 votes
2 answers
2k views

When did we stop diluting wine?

In ancient Rome, wine was drunk diluted with water, as discussed in this question. When did it become common practice not to dilute wine, but to drink it as is? I tried to look, and found nothing ...
1 vote
0 answers
169 views

When and how did Britons' (and offshoots like Americans) aversion to eating some parts of animals/fish (e.g. head/organs/blood/feet) begin?

Britons (and their offshoots the Americans and others) are today averse to eating some parts of animals/fish (e.g. head/organs/blood/feet). For example, chicken feet were worthless in the US until c. ...
25 votes
2 answers
7k views

Were there luxury restaurants in East Germany?

I was recently reading the excellent book Mac B, Kid Spy: Mac Saves the World by Mac Barnett. It is set in 1989, and Mac crosses the Berlin Wall to infiltrate the Television Tower in East Berlin. I ...
10 votes
2 answers
925 views

What would have been on the menu in an Ancient Egyptian tavern?

Public dining places It appears that there were public dining places in Ancient Egypt. A menu from one of them has been found, dating back to 6th Century BC. On this menu was cereal, wild fowl, and ...
5 votes
4 answers
533 views

Was there ever an occurrence of diplomatic communication using food?

Is there an example in history where two leaders, or even just foreign travelers, who could not understand each other's spoken language, communicated by food? I am not talking about very specific ...
14 votes
3 answers
2k views

What did European people of the 5th century AD eat during spring and what was the availability?

It is commonly believed that winter during that age was a period of starvation, with very limited means of procuring food. If the above is true, what did the commoners (peasants, serfs, etc) have to ...
1 vote
1 answer
896 views

What was the reason Jesus allowed Christians to eat pork? [closed]

Pork prohibitions date back to ancient Mesopotamia where for some cults consumption of pork was banned. Many people speculate if the bans against pork was to protect against trichinosis, which turns ...
7 votes
1 answer
716 views

Which early Imperial Roman writer said this about grains?

I definitively although vaguely recall a quote by a (first century AD?) Roman that asserts more or less that civilised Romans use wheat in baking, whereas Germans/Celts (I forget which) would use rye (...
30 votes
2 answers
6k views

What is the significance of barley as opposed to wheat in Ancient Rome?

Recently, I was reading about the Roman Army's use of decimation, and the Wikipedia article repeatedly mentions that after the application of this punishment, soldiers would have their wheat rations ...
5 votes
2 answers
552 views

Where/when does the wok start to differentiate itself from pot-style cooking vessels?

I can understand how basic pottery imitating gourds can lead to "cauldron" style hanging pots, and on to the modern shapes used predominantly in the west. Similar for the flat cooking ...
2 votes
1 answer
532 views

Was garlic an Egyptian deity, based on Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" (Book XIX, Ch 32)?

What historical evidence can validate Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" (Book XIX, Chapter 32) claim that - Egyptians worshiped garlic as a deity ? "Garlic and onions are invoked by ...
29 votes
6 answers
8k views

Why are cereal grains so important to agriculture and civilization?

I was looking through a list of foodstuffs and noticed that nuts have far more energy content, fat content and protein content than cereals (relative to their mass). They don't seem to be especially ...
37 votes
2 answers
7k views

When and why did garum disappear?

Garum or liquamen was, apparently, extremely popular in classical Rome, consumed by rich and poor on a daily basis, almost on par with bread. It was also known to other Mediterranean civilizations. ...
-1 votes
3 answers
670 views

How did people boil water before metal pots? [duplicate]

How did ancient peoples boil water or cook rice before somebody figured out how to make metal pots? Another way to ask this is: how would you cook rice if you found yourself stranded in the wilderness ...
2 votes
1 answer
837 views

Insect consumption in late middle-ages in the Northern Europe

Were insects consumed in the Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages by the rural population? It seems natural to use any available source of food during a famine, but in order to get substantial ...
9 votes
1 answer
479 views

When was it first noticed that airplane passengers really seemed to like tomato juice?

There is this observation/theory that during flights, people really like to drink much more tomato juice than while on the ground. "A small study" (as Wikipedia calls it) from 2015 tries to ...
7 votes
1 answer
2k views

During the Middle Ages, how many people could be fed by fishing?

I know fishing was pretty popular in the Middle Ages, but I don't know how many people could be fed by a single fisher. I'd mostly like to know about river fishing, but I'm also interested in sea ...
6 votes
1 answer
412 views

What's going on with this graph of wheat prices in "Civilization and Capitalism"?

I've been reading through Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Vol I: The Structures of Everyday Life. On page 135, there's a graph of the price of a quintal of wheat in ...
4 votes
0 answers
211 views

Where can I find a historic recipe for red cherry-onion jam?

A while back, I had duck with red cherry-onion jam at a medieval restaurant. Allegedly, it was a historic recipe, originally prepared in 1445 for the wedding of one of René d’Anjou’s daughters. As for ...
-1 votes
1 answer
157 views

Why do certain foods (i.e. wheat and rice) dominate our carbohydrate intake? [closed]

Today most human consume wheat, rice, and to a less extent potato as the main carbohydrate source, even though there are other carbohydrate sources too (corn, barley, tapioca, etc). Why is that so? ...
6 votes
2 answers
3k views

What was the main diet of pre-agricultural Asians?

The modern Asian diet is based mostly around rice. Was rice a major part of the paleolithic Asian diet? Did they know how to process and eat rice before agriculture? Aside from meats, what were other ...
17 votes
3 answers
9k views

Where did Southern Fried Chicken come from?

Wikipedia claims origins both in Scottish and West African cuisine. The problem I have with that is that the story I tend to see about the Scots-Irish who immigrated to North America is that they ...
-3 votes
1 answer
225 views

How did cannibals in Jamestown obtain bodies for food? [closed]

This article said that it was probably because of lack of food (In the Jamestown Colony), but if it was then why didn't the teenager be cared for or left alone instead of being eaten. How did the ...
14 votes
2 answers
12k views

What are the origins of knife and fork language etiquette?

There is an etiquette of placing knife and fork on a plate while resting or after finishing. For example this cheat-sheet (there are a lot of texts and images like this on the web): I found this ...
3 votes
1 answer
519 views

Why do biscuits depict ships?

I have noticed that several brands of biscuits have ships on them and have wondered why that is. A friend suggested that this is for historical reasons but I couldn't find any evidence of that. Where ...
14 votes
4 answers
4k views

What was the staple food of the natives of South East Asia before rice?

According to Wikipedia, history of rice, rice was first brought to South East Asia region across the caravan routes of the central Asian steppes. Now many of the subcontinental people of South East ...
4 votes
3 answers
3k views

Were shipboard gardens ever typical?

La Pérouse brought fruit trees and an herb garden on his fatal voyage; his gardener also tended the root cellar. Through the ages, how common or uncommon has it been to cultivate plants aboard a ship?
4 votes
0 answers
245 views

Are there records of soldiers opinions of canned food in WWI?

While reading the Wikipedia article on canning, I came across the following statement (with no citation). Throughout the war, British soldiers generally subsisted on low-quality canned foodstuffs, ...
6 votes
3 answers
652 views

What was special about ground foods for sacrificial meals?

To avoid repetition, I use 'pabulum' to mean food products ground for sacrificial meals. [Etymonline:] [...] immolare "to sacrifice," originally "to sprinkle with sacrificial meal," from ...
2 votes
0 answers
383 views

Why are milk and beer the only food item that are still measured in imperial units? [closed]

Apologies if this is in the wrong stack site, I couldn't think of a more appropriate place for it. I live in the UK. We're known for having mostly switched to the metric system except for a few ...
2 votes
0 answers
120 views

Did the Japanese use native Camellia species before Camellia sinensis was introduced from China?

According to Wikipedia the first known references to tea occured in the 9th century, when Buddhist monks introduced tea, a drink made from Camellia sinensis to Japan. The Camellia variety sinensis is ...