Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans

Posted by apollinaire 1 day ago

Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans(arstechnica.com)

51 points | 20 comments

thisismyweakarm 4 hours ago|

Article is mainly about the Baltics, but I always wondered what Italians ate before tomatoes came from the Americas.

thih9 3 hours ago||

If you’re interested in what ancient romans ate, that seems well documented.

Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

recursivecaveat 43 minutes ago|||

Their giant mound of 53 million olive oil amphorae has always fascinated me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio 20 liters of oil per person annually.

hedgehog 1 hour ago|||

I keep hoping I'll be able to get my hands on some silphium to see what it's like.

keiferski 3 hours ago|||

The majority of Italian food doesn’t actually use tomatoes. That impression is mostly because internationally-known Italian foods tend to use tomatoes (pizza for example.)

throwaway110022 3 hours ago|||

Pasta alla genovese is one such dish, it resembles modern ragu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genovese_sauce

That being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.

card_zero 3 hours ago||

Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth.

https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...

analog31 3 hours ago|||

Or Europeans before potatoes.

hedgehog 1 hour ago|||

Or peppers. Hungary without paprika!

zppln 2 hours ago|||

I heard turnips used to be all the rage.

throwup238 1 hour ago||

Although it should be noted that modern turnip varieties are significantly more flavorful and sweet than pre-Columbian exchange era turnips. The old varieties were usually very bland so it didn’t take much for another tuber to displace it.

burgreblast 2 hours ago|||

melanzana aka Aubergine aka eggplant

ginko 2 hours ago||

Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.

On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.

hyperpape 56 minutes ago|||

One of the most praised recent restaurants in the United States is based on an attempt to reconstruct pre-Colombian cuisine from the Americas: https://owamni.com/, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-bec....

lava_pidgeon 1 hour ago||||

Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potato

ginko 1 hour ago||

I'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable.

Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.

mmooss 1 hour ago|||

> no dairy

They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.

AlotOfReading 1 hour ago||

The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.

mmooss 1 hour ago||

From the referenced research paper:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> The combined application of microscopy techniques and lipid residue analysis to the study of foodcrusts from HGF [hunter-gatherer-fisher] pottery vessels has proved a successful approach ...

In academic research, what happens with unsuccessful approaches? I'm sure, like people in other fields, at some point you pull the plug and 'unsuccessful' is really defined as, 'stopped without success'. At some point the startup goes bankrupt, funders give up, the talent leaves, etc. ...

Research is by definition about breaking new ground, so you can't really know what you'll get. But what kind of risk is accepted and for how long? And who are the decision-makers - the researcher (of course), but also the talent? The institution? Funders? Also, at what point does it damage your reputation to continue?

One professor I know told me 'I submitted a title and abstract to this conference, and now I need to figure out how I'm going to do the research'. Maybe with enough experience, you have a good feel for it.

mmooss 1 hour ago|

The paper on which the article is based:

González Carretero L, Lucquin A, Robson HK, McLaughlin TR, Dolbunova E, Lundy J, et al. (2026) Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLoS One 21(3): e0342740.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...