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Comment by pyrhho | Hacker News Reader

- Better Bread? Historically bakers had extremely short lives because without mixers they had to breathe in the flour dust all day. And the bread would have been extremely unevenly cooked (no temperature-regulated ovens), as well as being extremely salty (no preservatives).

- Pasta? Pasta is absolutely amazing. It is an extremely dense source of calories, which doesn't rot, is super-compact, and only requires water and heat to cook. Great for armies on the march.

- Coffee? Coffee's been around a long time, but high-pressure espresso is relatively new.

Other fairly basic staples are newer than you might think, like Potatoes (16th Cent.), Or Tomatoes (17th Cent.)

Edit: Also limes for sailors.

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Edit: Also limes for sailors.

Actually that's a terrible idea. You want lemons, not limes. Really.

See http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm for a discussion of where the myth to the contrary came from, and for the complex history of how the proper prevention of scurvy was discovered, forgotten, proved false, and only later rediscovered again. It also discusses why you really don't want to use limes.

I apologize for this "+1" comment, but this scott-and-scurvy story is really awesome, on all sorts of levels. Science is hard to do correctly!

Pasta is an amazing invention. It's functionally similar to hard tack except it can be prepared to an edible state very quickly with merely boiling water and also tastes much better.

Can you make pasta with whole grain flour? I'm not sure milling techniques available in those days were able to make the right kind of flour.

Also without fortifying the flour pasta is calories without nutrients. It's useful as a suplement, but dangerous to live on it long term.

I've never made any pasta from scratch, but they sell whole-wheat pasta at my local grocer, so I assume it must be possible.

I've seen it too, but it's not regular pasta, it has some other ingredients, so I'm not sure you could make it by hand successfully.

I don't actually know if you can or not, I was just wondering.

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/whole-wheat-pasta/Detail.aspx

Could you please clarify why whole grain flour pasta would not have nutrients? Unless you meant white flour pasta. And here is how to make it from scratch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_wheat_flour

Grind whole wheat into flour with a coffee grinder: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1593906/make_lowcar... (you can also buy an expensive hand-crank version)

Whole Wheat Pasta recipe: http://www.sugarlaws.com/whole-wheat-pasta

Yes, I did mean the white flour pasta.

Some of these things would be helpful but you'd need to have them on you if you were dumped in the past. If you landed (now) in the Roman Empire how would you bring them potatoes? ("Just sail across the ocean, then go up the mountains on the other side of that continent and eat those root things there. Easy!")

Sorry, but you're wrong, and I think your racism is showing. Potatoes have been eaten for 7000 years, and tomatoes for 2500 years. They were introduced into Europe in the sixteenth century (and tomatoes weren't eaten there at first), but here in America, we've been eating them since well before medieval times.

Saying that potatoes is new is not racist, but it is ethnocentric.

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