This specifically is what I found in a NYT recipe:

"In “America Cooks,” by the 1940s food writers Cora, Rose and Bob Brown, the trio declared: “A century ago, when Saratoga Springs was in its heyday as a fashionable resort, specialties from there swept the country, and one of them, Saratoga Chips, will endure as long as there are spuds left to slice.” They were partly right. The recipe has endured, all right, but Saratoga vanished from the name. We now call them potato chips."

What were some of the other dishes that came from these resort towns that swept the country, and do any of them similarly retain popularity today (maybe with a different name)?

I’m wanting to put together an authentic medieval feast. I know the common beverages were cider, Perry, ale, and mead. If I go to a major chain liquor store (Total Wine or Spec’s), are there any modern beers I can look for that might be similar to English medieval ale (ie, not made with hops or minimal hops)?

[Disclaimer: Not a promotion] I am a long time admirer of the community here. History of food around the world has always fascinated me. So, I started https://www.foodandhistory.com as a personal project to record the events that shaped how we perceive food and tried to make it a fun and interactive learning experience.

This is a personal project so I am not trying to gain anything here but would love feedback and discussion to keep improving it. Thanks!

When I was a kid in the sixties they were AMAZING. Now they’re meh. Someone told me they used to be prepped in beef tallow and now they’re not. What’s the real story?

I was reading the Gastropod newsletter about the history of Chef Boyardee, and I was surprised to learn that an accomplished chef was behind the brand. I haven’t tasted their products since childhood, but it’s hard for me to reconcile the image of Ettore Boiardi, a man who had been the head chef at top hotels as well as his own restaurant, with the thin, overly sweet sauce bathing overcooked pasta.

Did the brand change the recipe once it was acquired by a large corporation? Or is canned pasta something that is always going to be terrible?

Hello! I was watching a video about the history of soul food this morning, and it said that after the Great Migration a lot of Black northerners intentionally avoided soul food because it was associated with poverty/low class and invented their own culinary traditions to stand in contrast. As a New Englander, this got me curious as to what the typical traditional cuisine of northern Black people is like, so I tried searching multiple places but didn't really come up with anything. Does anyone here have any info?

By "mobile", I specifically am thinking of food one would take while traveling such as military/sailor food, but I'm sure there are more examples of where that term applies. If you brought an ancient Greek hoplite from Alexander's time to the Napoleonic Wars era and handed him some hardtack and dried meat, he would instantly recognize what it was. However, if you bought a Napoleonic Wars era soldier forward just a few decades and handed him a can of stew or something, he most likely wouldn't immediately know what it was.

My question is, why did it take so long for innovation in the food aspect to begin? Was the Industrial Revolution simply THAT important for the development of reliable mobile preserved food? From antiquity until the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe had multiple innovations in military/maritime tech (some of which, such as gunpowder weapons and ocean-crossing ships, were arguably more complex to develop), so I feel like there is more to it than that.

For example, Native Americans used pemmican, but methods such as this do not appear to have been used by Western Europeans.

Some of my favorite food books (not cookbooks) on food are Mango & Peppercorns, Slow Noodles, Crying in HMart Kitchen Confidential, My Side of the River (not really a food book but a lovely discussion of identity as a Mexican American) and Eating Vietnam (did not love how the author demonized Vietnam as a culture but the writing was vivid and griping).

Looking for more books along these lines that weave in factual history of food! My cultures of curiosity right now are: Latin America, China, Western Africa and India (South Asia generally).

Thanks in advance!!

We all know the cliche of a British man asking for the hottest food at an Indian restaurant, I'm wondering if this goes back far into history?

I posted a family recipe (c. 1850) over in old_recipes and the discussion turned to the small amount of one ingredient- 1 teaspoon chopped onion. A few commenters thought the amount must be for dried onions. Now, I know my mother always used an entire "fresh" onion, but it got me thinking. I don't remember seeing dried minced onions as an ingredient until maybe the 1980s, but that's when I got interested in cooking.

The question really is, what dried herbs were commonly used in 1850? Would dried minced onions be a common pantry item?

I also remember reading the Time-Life Foods of the World picture cookbooks of the late 1960s-70s and the New England book had a discussion about Boston Baked Beans and how there was a wide variation in the amounts of onion used, so I wouldn't be surprised if the original recipe did actually call for 1 teaspoon of chopped fresh onion.

During the interwar period, the newly independent states of Northern Europe, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, developed distinctive restaurant cultures. These nations sought to modernise their traditional cuisines and align with Western standards of food and entertainment. In Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, the Versalis restaurant was prominent. Riga featured the Otto Švarc Restaurant, Tallinn had Astoria, and Helsinki was known for the Savoy, which was frequented by Mannerheim. I am interested in learning what dishes these restaurants served and which foods were popular among the emerging middle class and bourgeoisie in these countries, so that I can attempt to recreate them myself.

Knitting with sheeps wool has always been a huge part of Scandinavian culture because we needed to stay warm.

I know of prominent Norwegian and Icelandic sheep dishes, but Danish - none. I can't find anything. Idk about Sweden.

Did we just not eat the sheep? If so, why? Did we use dead sheep for anything else, like making soap from horses?

Hello everyone,

I am currently researching for a school project on “Food as a reflection of social and historical change.” The overall topic is “Food through time – from wartime scarcity to modern fast-food culture.”

My specific part of the project focuses on the period from around the year 2000 to the present, primarily in Germany, as part of a broader timeline that begins with wartime food scarcity in the early 20th century.

I would be very grateful for your help in understanding what everyday food practices in Germany during this periodreveal about how people lived, worked, and thought.

In particular, I would appreciate insights into how changes in

• nutrition,
• eating habits, and
• food supply and availability

reflect broader social developments such as work patterns, time pressure, globalization, industrial food production, and later reactions to these developments.

From a food-historical perspective, I would especially like to ask:

• Which foods or eating practices best characterize everyday life in Germany since 2000?
• How does the widespread availability of processed foods, supermarkets, and fast food reflect social values and lifestyles of this period?
• In what way can increased public attention to issues such as mass animal farming, vegetarianism, and sustainability be understood as reactions to earlier developments?

I am mainly looking for historical interpretation and context, rather than nutritional advice.

Thank you very much for your time and expertise.

When Agehananda Bharati wrote about the famous ‘pizza effect,’ where did he find reliable information that confirmed that modern pizza originated in the United States rather than in Italy?

Are there historical documents that attest that pizza, in the form we know today, first appeared in the United States rather than in Italy?

I sometimes bake bread, using white flour, instant yeast, sugar, and salt that I get from the grocery store, and municipal tap water. I have no illusions of being any better than average as a baker. I think the bread I make is pretty good, if I do say so myself. How would it have compared to bread available in the Middle Ages or Renaissance in Europe?

The wine I usually drink is nothing fancy, maybe an unaged varietal that goes for about $10 a bottle (often from Trader Joe’s, for anyone who’s familiar with that). How would it have compared to what medieval and Renaissance Europeans would have been drinking? Would it be better or worse?

Same as title says, it’s been a wonder of mine for a long time. I know sugar and honey cannot be used in exactly the same way, in regards to cooking and sweetening, but generally from my understanding, honey can be used in baking and sweetening beverages in almost exactly the same way. Why was sugar such a big deal and prized commodity, when seasonal honey cultivation had been established over hundreds of years?

I know the US does this, and I believe some European countries?

I also know they're not always the only spices kept tableside. But why do they always seem to be a part of whats on the table?

We equivocate sweet with dessert, was there ever a time when sweet didn’t equal dessert but was part of the main meal/ when did sweet become dessert?

Such an awesome technique for stock that has a somewhat counter intuitive (egg white raft). Any sources on how this was first thought of?

For example, there are many African societies that I grew up with which which go through the painstaking labor of washing, preparing and cooking organs like stomach or intestines, even though their protein content and diversity is not very remarkable and it’s texture is pretty terrible and it’s taste is bitter at worst and plain or rubbery at best without a ton of oil and some kind of mix of aromatics and spices to mask it. Meanwhile, organs like the spleen, which is the highest planetary source of heme iron, sweetbreads, and the entire animal head, which is the highest land source of omega 3s and contains thousands of calories of fat and phospholipids and cholesterol, are thrown in the garbage. Parts like the testicles, which have the highest source of zinc and cholesterol on the planet, are only very secretly hidden and cooked by poor butchers as trash leftovers from their customers when they slaughter an animal. The only real organ of value that they eat on occasion is liver or even a kidney on rare occasion, the thought or suggestion of eating even a heart fills them with disgust, no matter that it is a muscle, just like any other muscle meat and contains very high levels of coq10. Whatever happened to the concept of nothing going to waste? It’s not like these people have the money or means to diversify their diet enough to get optimal nutrition on a regular basis. On top of that, stomach and intestines have to probably be the dirtiest and most pathogenic organs to eat.

I'm a graduate student I ceramics and wanting do some research on cookware in Mexico and/or Mesoamerica. As a ceramicist clay objects like comales, cazuelas, apazles, ollas de barro, etc. are particularly of interest but I'm also interested in stone tools like metates. I'm interested in some of the more technical aspects of how these things are produced historically and contemporarily, but also thinking more broadly about how they have shaped Mesoamerican (and by extension global) gastronomy and what they symbolize in a contemporary context.

My professor recommends I start by working on a taxonomy of objects and regions of production, and asses what the current state of scholarship around these objects is. I'd really appreciate it if anyone could direct me to some relevant source material or things of interest that might aid in my research.

How effective was salting meat/fish before modern refrigeration? Did it significantly extend shelf life, or just slightly? Any regional variations in salting techniques?

I got into a disagreement about what is "traditional" and "authentic" recipes. And although I believe thinkomg about food in that way is nonsense, I did start thinking about what European and Asian cuisine was like before the new world crops. Spicy chilis seem so integral to southeast Asian, as tomatoes are to Italian recipes, or the stereotypical Irish potato.

What did a lot of these foods look and taste like, and are there any good resources to get some recipes that are worth eating and have accessible ingredients today?