What did the ancient Romans eat?
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The quick garrum presented in that video is really just a salty fish stock, and I suspect would lack the protein breakdown products that make garrum so special.
You can however make garrum quickly, with the protein breakdown products, albeit lacking a little complexity from the extended ageing (primarily maillard reaction products, but probably other lactic fermentation and more complex breakdown chains).
Preston Landers has created a technique [1] that uses dietary supplements as a source of very high enzyme concentrations. I've done this method, and it's pretty easy to accomplish, and produces really great results, in about 3 hours.
When I researched this question maybe 8 years ago, the technique was well understood. The outstanding question was which fish was used for this historically, and back then there were a few contenders. Has this since been settled or did you just pick one?
With Balyk you salt the fish-flesh to make it dry out and to conserve it. Then you eat the dry fish. Do i see that right?
With garum you salt the fish to drive a fishy liquid out of it then you ferment this liquid. The end product is the fermented fish-juice which is used as a condiment.
Both involves fish and salt but they appear to be very different beasts.
About how offputing garum is: obviously it wasn’t offputting for the romans. They consumed huge ammounts of it. That doesn’t necessarily means that the production wasn’t offputting. After all it is basically letting a pile of fish rot in a controlled manner. By all accounts i have read they produced it at industrial scale outside of the cities not in people’s homes.
The other problem one might run into is that the exact art of the process needs reverse engineering. Imagine if all you would read about cheese making is a few paragraphs. Further imagine that you have never eaten cheese nor you know anyone who has ever did. Good luck figuring out where to start making chesse, let alone if what you got at the end is good cheese. This means that while real garum was definietly not offputting to romans, the process of experimenting with producing it now might be. And at the end you might end up with something weird and you won’t know if you just haven’t acquired a taste for it, or if perhaps it went off so badly that not even a roman would consume it.
As someone has already pointed out, it's very similar to colatura/nuoc mam/nam pla though the Romans added some herbs.
Differences must be same as differences between Thai/Vietnamese/Japanese sorts.
You just leave salted fish to ferment under sun and then collect liquid. Add other ingredients you like but they are not essential.
I could have sworn I learned about Apicus from an ancient HN thread... but apparently it's never been linked on here before? Did moths eat the thread?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm [English, 1936]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
related: "Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in Pompeii"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25543742
semi-related: "The mystery of silphium, a lost Roman herb (2017)"
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Shocking! Somehow whenever i think of "italian food" the first few images that come into my mind usually involve tomatoes somehow...
Also an american import.
The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will be Nature's Salvation by Fred Pearce
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion
But yeah, there were some flavours still.
By comparison German stuff is much sweater. Horseradish sauces are another matter though!
We consume more than one kind of mustard, one of them being aptly called "Süßer Senf" - sweet mustard[1], which is pretty far from your ordinary mustard in every way. It isn't hot at all, mostly sweet. You wouldn't use it instead of regular mustard (or vice-versa).
There's just no way "German mustard" is referring to anything specific enough to start making such comparisons. You'd have to narrow it down to regions of Germany to get anywhere, such as a Bavaria, the origin of sweet mustard.
[1]: This likely being the most popular brand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4ndlmaier
If I gave you spicy Portuguese mustard you would think it was tasteless, by comparison.
It took me quite a while to get used to the variants here, as in being able to actually digest them.
Or is this some kind of "nothing is too spicy for me" one-upmanship? Spicyness is useless if you don't have flavor to go along with it.
There’s much older things about, but the bulk of building was done during the population and tramway explosion circa 1880-1920.
Or if you think of Ireland you think of potatoes.
Many types of plant from the Americas (the continent not "USA! USA!") and make up what people eat all over the world; potatoes, peppers, corn, tomatoes, chocolate, peanuts, vanilla.
Black pepper is an entirely separate species, and is indeed native to southeast Asia.
(It's enough to make you wish English could come up with some other name for the damn things. Come now, she boasts the largest vocabulary of any language -- is there any sensible reason she can't come up with some other name for the paprika fruit than "pepper"?!?)
Thinking about this myself a while ago, I wondered - even if someone went there and back, and even brought something along, how could we tell? That Norse saga had a mythical status at most, and even with that it isn't necessarily clear for a casual listener that it may be about reaching another previously unknown continent. Other groups along the history may have also pulled it off, but then their contemporaries, in order to consemnate the event, had to take their word for it? Even with some seeds as evidence, the world was less connected untill very recently and there were plenty of isolated places, yet relatively close, for strange seeds to be found. After thousand of years, it's hard to tell if an annual plant was brought at some point in time by intercontinental explorers, or migrated by some other non-human related way, or has been local since before continents went appart. Then it was hard to discern the magnitude of a discovery. Even the Norsemen, like the later Spaniard colonists, couldn't tell how big their found body of land was, if the Vinland they reached was an island they haven't yet circumnavigated yet or happened to be a continent spanning south down to well into southern hemisphere. No, for a discovery like this to stick, with clear compiled inventories of imported plants, it had to be done by a government-like entity, that could afford the high risks of loss that an exploration program on the limits of available technology pose, and with enough logistics and cultural development to pursue a wide range of interests (as opposed to small groups, for which keeping track of traffiked plants may be of lesser concern).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato_cultivation_in_Po...
Although natural dispersal of Sweet Potato is a possible explanation, the evidence for natural dispersal is weaker than the evidence for pre-Columbian contact (for instance, the similarity of the Quechua word for sweet potato, "kumar", and the Maori "kumara").
Native to the Americas, but somehow ended up in India in the 4th century. Wow!
You have to realise that a lot of the people who went that route weren’t “vikings” as such. Going viking was something you did, but 90% of Scandinavians were just farmers. In fact the reason we are such a homogeneous people here is largely because most farmers even had little contact with the sea-sized settlements that did go Viking. The Scandinavian explorers who headed north from Iceland and eventually ended up in America were likely farmers who had lost their lands for whatever reason, and as such were likely settlers rather than warriors. Many who would have had no intention of ever going back, even if they hadn’t perished.
I’m not a big expert on ecology, but I also think that the climate they landed in was basically worse than what they came from. So there probably wasn’t a whole lot of exotic foods to trade, even if they had wanted to.
Edit: As for the tomato question, the sagas suggests that no or very little friendly interaction with the natives took place, so no real trade or exchange of knowledge. These where not full on atlantic voyages but mostly near coastal areas of Greenland and what is now northen Canada. I kinda doubt that the natives would be growing tomatoes that far north anyway. Though, they did claim to find grapes, which suggests that they ventured a fair bit south as well...
First, we have proof of Viking settlements, but they just seemed to die off completely. It may be that before they really got settled, they were just killed by natives.
We don't have actual proof, it seems, of anyone else being here earlier.
Outside of that, the tomato, potato, and a lot of other things, aren't native to Canada, or even the US. It's native to Central and South America, which is 4000 or so km in a direct line, and 7000 or 8000km "hugging the coast" travel from where a viking settlement was found on the coast of Canada.
So just being in the "new world", won't even remotely put you in contact with everything.
On the farming side, no one really understood much about soil management, conditions, crop rotation, fertilizing, drainage, fungus, "growing zones" etc, etc until the 20th century.
Often, attempts to transplant crops would fail miserably, by:
* placing them in the wrong location (some plants die with too much sun, others with too little)
* same as above, but "requires a more southern climate" or "northern climate". Some plants literally cannot grow with short/long day cycles like the far North or South has.
* placing a plant in too wet, or too dry soil for its growth requirements. One plant may rot in a certain type of soil (clay/wet/whatever), another thrive
Well, there are many points like this. Farmers often knew their specific plants, but it was all guesswork compared to scientifically derived knowledge in the early 20th.
So even if a handful of seeds somehow made it back to Europe earlier than Spain getting to the new world and back, there's no promise it would thrive on a first-try.
Especially if it was just fishermen, not even interacting with the natives (maybe, earlier contact as you suggest).
But beyond all that, superstition! When the tomato was first introduced, it was actually seen as a 'sign of the devil'. It was considered evil, and dangerous to eat.
And if you look at corn, for a long time the Brits and much of Europe considered it only suitable as 'pig food'. Most humans wouldn't touch it, and likely this had also to do with taste, for the rural town I grew up had 'cow corn', which is corn hardier, quicker to grow, but not as succulent, or even very tasty (too starchy).
Early farmed corn was like this, starchy, and it took centuries to get the human palatable breeds we have now. Natives in the new world used it just for flour, basically, not as a grain to eat on its own.
And to speak to that, natives had to process corn in a special way:
https://www.spiceography.com/corn-flour/
Otherwise, it severely lacked in nutrition. Yet, Europeans may have just thought it was "tradition" to prepare corn this way...
I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, there's a lot of nuance here. Just taking a few seeds won't guarantee growth, or adoption.
Erm, another thought:
https://storytellergarden.co.uk/vegetables/when-potatoes-wer...
Potatoes were seen as deadly in some places and illegal, were seen as horrible in other places (and, people had to trick the commoners into eating them:
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/28/prussian-and-the-p... )
They refused to learn from the Inuit residents of Greenland, who were adapted to those conditions and survived just fine. Why? We can't be certain but probably religious and/or racial prejudice did play some role in that.
Before they were wiped out, would the pagans and druids have called the tomato on encounter the love apple?
Not superstition. Pewter plates and acidic tomato juice makes lovely tasty heavy metal poisoning.
No they were not:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery...
A list of other supposed contacts:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...
Regarding the "toxic recipe" (Absinthium Romanum), I've made and drunk this several times and have survived to tell the tale. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_absinthium#Toxicity for more information.
If a civilization lasted for several hundred years, there's no single answer for that kind of topic. Food is fashion, and is ever changing over time. It's like asking "What did ancient Americans eat between 1600 and 2000?" years in the future, and the answer will vary widely for each century (and regardless of technical progress).
How can you know that to be true as a fact? Do you have a time machine? And new recipes don't need new ingredients to exist. Changing the way you cook things, the temperature, the process, how you mix them, the tools you use, or even random luck can lead to new recipes.
Survivor bias, well known fallacy that Historians are hardly familiar enough with.
Corn syrup, of course.
> In this “revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to today” (Publishers Weekly), the fascinating story of how one vast country comprised of uniquely distinct regions came to produce some of the most delicious and beloved foods of all time is expertly revealed.
* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Delizia!/John-Dickie/...
(He also wrote Cosa Nostra, about the Sicilian mafia, and Blood brotherhoods: a history of Italy's three mafias.)
I think that you idealizing ancient Rome.
Ice was a delicacy.
"Dishes for geographically distant ingredients"?
No meat, no fruits, no milk products.
So it's only cereals could be imported from long distances.
I think you're underestimating what could be done with preservation technology such as salting, curing, drying, pickling, fermenting etc. Meats were in fact frequently traded. Salted pork was a staple food. Cheese even more so.
And what of liquids? You're surely aware of ancient wrecks filled with amphoras? What was in them? Surely not cereals. Oils, wines, vinegars, acidic sauces such as the famed "garum" - all travel well.