Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

By coincidence I noticed this article while in the process of preparing lamb curry for dinner. The article quoted researchers studying ancient spice trade and usage: "Of the 40 tools we analyzed, 12 produced a range of spices including turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg and cinnamon."

Quite interesting that curries evidently haven't changed very much over 2K years. Indeed my curry contains 6 out of 8 of those ingredients. Of course many present-day technologies contribute to making spices available in abundance in food markets or online. Compared to ancient times in some ways we have it pretty easy, in today's world making curries from scratch isn't really a high challenge.

The article shows that our predecessors were as perceptive as we are, they understood a lot more than we realize. Of course while everything changes over time, fundamental insights tend to retain their enduring value.

View on HN

> The article shows that our predecessors were as perceptive as we are, they understood a lot more than we realize

Who's we? Apart from distributed knowledge in scientific/geographic topics and technological tools who thinks that our generation is somehow more evolved? People have had a perfectly fine intelligence and a good insight for a very long time. And arguably in some topics like psychology, power dynamics or the search for pleasure nothing important has changed for thousands of years

That is sadly common perception (IMHE). Just look at the use of the "cave man" as an illustration of dumbness.

It’s in part a philosophical question as well. In part because in the West we have a strong Protestant history we are tied to the myth of bettering through time. This has been expressed starkly by “providence” which eventually minimized (and then abandoned) the Christian aspect and turned into “progress”. This is our defining narrative myth today.

I suspect because the advancements in technology have been so distinct that we’ve generalized into everything. It’s all about getting positive recognition from future people because the people of the past embarrass us. This is why people don’t generally ask “what would the people of yesterday say about us people of today?”. Especially interesting since we owe a gratitude to them.

> curries evidently haven't changed very much over 2K years

The addition of chillis a few hundred years ago feels like a very large change

Yeah -- the fact that chili peppers only came to Asia a few hundred years ago isn't widely recognized for what a change it must have been to the cuisine. Just as the fact that Europe had no tomatoes or potatoes until around the same time a few hundred years ago.

Yup. In Sri Lanka we calls chilies "miris," and pepper "gam miris" (translation: village chilies).

I guess folks originally used pepper as the way to set their mouths on fire; and once introduced, happily jumped over to chilies as a much better way to do so.

Oh, interesting! In Thai, peppercorns are พริกไทย, literally “Thai chilli”, where I think most Westerners would think of (and indeed Wikipedia says that) Thai chillis as being bird chilli (พริกขี้หนู, lit “mouse shit chilli”)

Phrik kii nuu is a specific type of chilli pepper, namely bird's eye/chilli padi, the really spicy small ones. There are many other varieties:

https://www.foodrepublic.com/1295447/what-are-different-thai...

Is the implication that chili displaced local peppers as the "default" spicy condiment assigned the basic vocabulary item, with the latter relegated to the status of a "rural"/"traditional" variant?

Other pertinent new world crops that drastically altered staple cuisines in Asia: potato, tomato, corn. Then of course there's tobacco / nicotine, and from more of an ornamental standpoint, the frangipani appears critically entwined with temples across numerous Asian countries and religious and philosophical traditions however is also a new-world Johnny come lately.

Some things that come to mind that spread in the other direction (Asia to Europe/Africa/America) in a little known and relatively late fashion were citrus and the chicken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken

The domestic chicken is supposed to have come from the junglefowl of India, as it says in the above Wikipedia article.

That's why it was listed under "other direction". Also, if you read the recent paper, it actually identifies Myanmar as the approximate origin.

>That's why it was listed under "other direction".

That's why I quoted the Wikipedia link that you quoted - after reading the initial part of it, it, although I had also read about chickens and junglefowl years before, being interested in such topics, and being an Indian who has also roamed about in such jungles in Central India as a teenager:

I had said, above:

>>as it says in the above Wikipedia article.

Umm, the epicenter of wild chicken biodiversity is not within modern or historic Indian borders, as far as the science can tell. It is in Myanmar, well beyond the range of direct subcontinental rule (excepting perhaps the British period). What exactly are you arguing? It is unclear from your statements.

>What exactly are you arguing? It is unclear from your statements.

Jeez! What exactly makes you think that I am arguing anything at all, in the first place?

In my above comment, I had used words like:

>chicken is supposed to have come from

and

>as it says in the above Wikipedia article

Note the italicized words.

So that can't be considered an argument at all. It was just a casual observation, along the lines of saying "hey, I heard or read 'foo' statement somewhere".

Make of it what you will, but don't try to turn it into an argument when it is not one.

>Umm, the epicenter of wild chicken biodiversity is not within modern or historic Indian borders, as far as the science can tell. It is in Myanmar, well beyond the range of direct subcontinental rule (excepting perhaps the British period).

As I said, my words were not an argument, even though you interpreted them as such. But even if they were an argument, you may be taking a narrow view of what was considered "India". And this is not about political boundaries (referring to your word "rule"). It was meant in the ecological / geographical / biological region senses of the term, under which, BTW, Myanmar is fairly close to (distance-wise) and similar to India anyway (although I was not even thinking of Myanmar above, nor had I even mentioned it). In those senses, a much larger geographical area was considered as part of "India", even in pre-British times. You might want to look up your history / natural history / geography of the India subcontinent (and even South-East Asia) a bit.

To end, I think you might be one of confused, pedantic or trolling, none of which interests me, since as I said, mine was just a casual observation, not an argument. So I am exiting this discussion.

>Other pertinent new world crops that drastically altered staple cuisines in Asia: potato, tomato, corn. Then of course there's tobacco / nicotine, and from more of an ornamental standpoint, the frangipani appears critically entwined with temples across numerous Asian countries and religious and philosophical traditions however is also a new-world Johnny come lately.

It is known as the Columbian exchange:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

Absolutely, what a great addition to all kinds of cuisine! I'd never intentionally minimize the merit of chilis. I use chilis a lot, couldn't imagine cooking without them. Your point is well-taken.

FWIW, along with chilis a number of other common curry spices weren't mentioned in the article: garlic, mustard seeds, fenugreek, saffron, black pepper, cardamom, among others. So it's quite possible curries were less tasty in the past, at least to our palates. OTOH seems likely enough that they employed a range of flavorings that don't show up on the tools the researchers examined.

Black pepper does pretty well, and I believe is what was predominantly used before.

I think they even perceived more. No post newtonian modeled science but the were constantly face to face with nature and matter.

And they weren't distracted by/staring at screens all day long.

That too, the depth of focus was surely higher for them. And slow lifestyle also helps long term thinking.

no cumin mentioned though. that seems to be the highest volume spice in most Indian curry recipes I've seen.

Cumin is a northern thing.

Also curry is basically an orientalized term for a soup or stew. If Chorba or Borscht are soups, then most curries are as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com