Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans (arstechnica.com)
51 points by apollinaire a day ago
thisismyweakarm 5 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.
recursivecaveat 41 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 an 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 2 hours ago
Or peppers. Hungary without paprika!
zppln 3 hours ago
I heard turnips used to be all the rage.
throwup238 2 hours ago
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 an hour 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 an 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 an hour ago
mmooss an 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 an hour ago
mmooss an 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 2 hours 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...