101
votes
Accepted
What did babies eat before the advent of modern blenders?
Many babies were indeed fed mashed food, typically of cooked vegetables and fruits. While it's true that not all foods can be prepared like this, keep in mind that pre-modern families rarely have ...
- 97.5k
97
votes
Accepted
What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
In "Millennium From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization
Has Changed Over a Thousand Years"*, Mortimer explains the origin of 3 meals a day:
As for mealtimes, few people in northern Europe ate ...
- 1,008
90
votes
Is it true that "All spicy food is from Latin America"?
I live in Thailand, and I wondered about the same. I asked this question to several Thais with some knowledge in history. Chili peppers come from the Americas. That's correct. They are imported into ...
- 20.9k
74
votes
Accepted
Is it true that "All spicy food is from Latin America"?
While it is true that most hot spices originated in the Americas, spicy food was evident in most ancient civilizations and originated from many different regions of the world.
There is both physical ...
- 108k
67
votes
Accepted
Why are cereal grains so important to agriculture and civilization?
Let's look at the walnut, since it's been cultivated for a long time.
If you start with the seed, it will take you 10 years (roughly) to have a tree mature enough to produce fruit, assuming you plant ...
- 774
65
votes
Accepted
How did they cook on ancient ships?
That's a good question. As far as we know, most ancient voyages didn't venture that far from land. Ships like the Bronze Age Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya shipwrcks are thought to have been coastal ...
- 77.4k
64
votes
Accepted
Did the Romans eat breakfast?
It seems the issue may be with generalizing 'Romans' as single entity and not as a group which changed through time. Johnston in The Private Life of the Romans goes into the changes seen in the Roman ...
- 38.7k
62
votes
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Is rye bread Turkish?
Q Is rye bread Turkish?
Are Swedes Africans?
If you find the 'African Swedes' question senseless, then you see the level of absurdity the ad is playing on. If you answer 'Swedes are Africans' in the ...
- 80.8k
55
votes
Accepted
How did people put down a drinking horn?
In short, either when it was empty or it had a stand.
Drinking horns were used by many different cultures on different continents (Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe e.t.c.) and in different time ...
- 108k
51
votes
Accepted
Were there luxury restaurants in East Germany?
Yes, there was 'luxury' in gastronomical areas in East-Germany.
This yes comes with a slight caveat: that was more rare than in the West and also in a 'reduced amount', often catering to international ...
- 80.8k
49
votes
Is it true that "All spicy food is from Latin America"?
Mustard, horseradish, ginger and cumin all grow in the old world and are by most definitions spicy.
- 529
49
votes
Accepted
What was the liquor that was based on petrol which was produced in the USSR during the Second World War?
There is quite some strange quotation mixing up the interpretation. My version of that book reads:
An ancient L.A.C. had been trying to fill his lighter from a large petrol tin. He does it by tilting ...
- 80.8k
48
votes
What did babies eat before the advent of modern blenders?
Mother's milk, overlapping with more solid food, was typically a major part of a baby's diet for much longer than we now think of in many western countries, where starting weaning at a few months and ...
- 591
47
votes
Accepted
Did active frontiersmen really eat 20,000 calories a day? How does this compare to other highly-active people in recorded history?
The 10,000 calorie figure - or perhaps slightly lower - is about right as a ceiling for maintaining muscle mass over months of hard work with downtime only to sleep. Across the centuries, workers with ...
- 8,918
46
votes
Accepted
Why did early attempts to transport milk to London by rail meet with 'much criticism'?
The Agrarian History of England and Wales
E. J. T. Collins, Joan Thirsk
Cambridge University Press, 2000
page 993:
Retailers complained that railway milk was not as fresh as town milk,
and a ...
- 446
44
votes
Is it true that "All spicy food is from Latin America"?
Answer to question as originally posted:
This is more of a language use problem, in several ways.
The first comment is correct in stating that capsaicin containing dishes (these are the "hot, spicy")...
- 80.8k
43
votes
Accepted
When and why did garum disappear?
Short Answer
Garum production and consumption declined because increasing instability in the late Western Empire disrupted production and trade (and not just of garum). Further, a key ingredient - ...
- 108k
42
votes
Accepted
What is the significance of barley as opposed to wheat in Ancient Rome?
If any cohorts gave way in battle, he (Augustus) decimated them, and fed the rest on barley.
(Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 24.2)
More confirmation for the practice, not necessarily always in ...
- 80.8k
40
votes
Is rye bread Turkish?
Well rye itself (the grain) appears to have first been domesticated in Anatolia, around 6,500 BC. So of course Neolithic people there (modern Turkey) would have been the first to make rye bread.*
As ...
- 118k
37
votes
Why are cereal grains so important to agriculture and civilization?
As Keith points out, versatility and yield are a major factor.
So is storage. Grains can be stored for months longer than root vegetables and still be edible (potatoes and such go off much quicker, ...
- 11.3k
36
votes
Accepted
Why do old kitchen stoves have circular openings in the upper surface?
I have no reference other than personal use and observation, having once lived many years in rural areas where virtually everyone used wood stoves.
Yes, you may remove the appropriate sized plate and ...
33
votes
What did babies eat before the advent of modern blenders?
Methods for making fruit and vegetable purees existed long before the modern electric blender.
A mechanical food mill is usable on most cooked fruits and vegetables with very good results. I don't ...
- 999
28
votes
Why didn't cheese spoil when it was given as rations to soldiers?
First and foremost, for an army recommendations and even regulations would be always conditional on availability; if there was not enough cheese available or if cheese had gone bad then simply cheese ...
- 12.4k
28
votes
Accepted
Did ancient or medieval people know about underground rivers/lakes?
Awareness of (and habitation alongside) underground rivers dates back many thousands of years. Cave systems with rivers, providing a ready supply of one life's essentials, were shelters from both the ...
- 108k
22
votes
How did they cook on ancient ships?
Rations on ships during the age of exploration were typically of a type that would require little or no cooking. They included things like "hardtack" (unleavened bread), and salted meat, that could be ...
- 104k
21
votes
Accepted
When Adam Smith discusses "corn" to what crop does he refer?
The word corn, Wiktionary tells us, can mean:
(Britain) The main cereal plant grown for its grain in a given region, such as oats in parts of Scotland and Ireland, and wheat or barley in England ...
- 1,557
21
votes
Why do old kitchen stoves have circular openings in the upper surface?
You take out the rings so that the bottom of the pot is heated by the air from the fire.
If you put the pot directly on the metal, you can only transfer heat by conduction, but to get efficient heat ...
19
votes
What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
Wondering if it's like this in all cultures currently, and if not, how variable it is
Well, it certainly isn't like that in all cultures.
In Spain we have 5 meals:
Desayuno
Similar to breakfast. 7-...
- 373
19
votes
Is it true that "All spicy food is from Latin America"?
Spicy and related words can definitely describe the sensations provoked by various food items. The words seem used most often to describe the substance capsaicin, present in chile peppers. In that ...
- 27.6k
18
votes
What was the reason Jesus allowed Christians to eat pork?
Jews and Pigs
We don't really know.
The problem with this one is that lots of people have plausible-sounding reasons for the prohibition. Lots of people have implausible-sounding reasons for this too. ...
- 118k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible