That was only true in coastal North America (and even there, the tales of disgust have probably also been exaggerated), not Europe. There are traces of it being appreciated going back to the Romans and Greeks. http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodlobster.html
I don't know. I'm not sure the historians fully know. This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. What I have learned is that the concept evolved (like so much cooking does) from what I described into a "it's actually now a recipe that people prepare once."
Something else I learned is that back in the day, people had different expectations for food quality. We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat). And maybe while the concept was "it's always going", there were practical things we like to exclude from oral/written tradition, such as "well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad." Who knows!
I remember all the vegetables etc. thrown away / not eaten in Germany back then - especially mushrooms (not vegetables, not animals I know) if I remember correctly.
Or Italian food without tomato sauce, Ireland and Poland without potatoes, or Switzerland without chocolate. It really was one of the most consequential moments in human history.
The father of a friend of mine (an intellectual medical doctor) has a theory that most of the fine foods in french cuisine and other cultures, are so prized because they have the same smells and microorganisms of the genitals. Really gross, but I think the evidence bears out- I forgot the foods that were mentioned, other than the cheeses, but there were several unexpected ones.
I have worked at St.Johns in London and while offal is a novelty there..it used to be a complete way of life in rural France. It’s entirely unheard of on this side of the pond these days.
Fwiw, it’s not entirely unpleasant..neither is it that tasty. France (and the Basque) has all sorts of weird gender lines when it comes to culinary prowess. I am sure it is more so in other parts of Europe.
French cuisine is very regional. Lyonnaise cuisine with its self proclaimed excellence owes a lot of Roman cuisine. In fact, all of French cuisine owes a big debt to the Italians. The Italian princess Caterina de'Medici who later became the French Queen was the one who introduced so many flavors and dishes and even new vegetables to the French court.
The other Queen who influenced French cuisine and instrumental to the birth of the restaurant concept did so by proclaiming her fondness for cake and boldly encouraged the peasants to eat it. They thanked her with a day trip to the guillotine.(that also turned out to be..paraphrasing from P.G.Wodehouse..a French cure for gray hair)
Nobody eats Machon breakfasts anymore except the tourists. Well..not ‘nobody’. It’s still a novelty. It goes down well with offerings from the local vineyards. It will literally ‘sit’ in your belly for well for 7-8 hours and you wouldn’t feel hungry at all.
Some of the dishes are rather old fashioned and French cooking guilds are mostly for preserving the cooking traditions(largely peasant food traditions) that would be lost otherwise. I would encourage everyone to adopt a largely plant based diet, but might as well utilize the entire animal if killing one for sustenance.
However..these dishes and recipes came from an era when starvation was not uncommon and preservation methods were important due to lack of refrigeration. These days offal will straight away go to pet food factories. Offal will remain a novelty cuisine in our future.
I like Ancient Roman food (the oldest complete recipes available), used to cook it quite often, and have served it to family and guests. It isn't to everyone's taste, possibly due to unfamiliar herbs (e.g. rue, lovage), spices (e.g. asafoetida), and their putting fish sauce in everything, including sometimes puddings.
True and I'm thinking of the fancier and harder things like the Worcestershire sauce or such that would've been around but still the realm of specialists. you can make likker with rats and water, but you can also make incredibly nasty things you'll wish you hadn't :)
See also curing meats and some of the uglier cheeses. We've tamed many microbes in service of foods.
That's... so French. Thanks for adding this bit. I'm always in need of culinary history ammo when I am confronted with having to feed people who only trust industrially processed food. Such as many of my relatives.
That's a interesting example – I totally agree with you in the general case, but I'd actually always thought of 'Greek yoghurt' the same way I thought of 'French fries'!
It was actually in culinary use in the UK in the 19th century, but seemed to fall out of favour in the 20th (at least until the revival credited to Elisabeth David). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29220046
Another theory (at least on this side of the pond) goes something along the lines of:
After people got access to refrigerators and freezers and such it was no longer necessary to hide the taste of spoilt foodstuffs, and thus it became high fashion to make your food as mild as possible to show off your fancy new fridge.
I think they didn’t know. Pasteurization didn’t come about until the mid 1800s. Maybe they suspected heating played a part - Wikipedia says it was a known method of preservation in China since the 1100s, but I think it took longer to get to Europe.
It was/is a dish in the Northern Europe called “Dulce” in Ireland that somehow fell out of favor, story below. I imagine the evolution was like the lobster, at one point something indentured servants wouldn’t eat, at another a delicacy of sorts.
reply