Friday, September 2, 2016

If I were to eat a meal that was cooked 1000 years ago by a professional chef, would it still taste good by modern standards?

You don't have to go 1,000 years to find foods you don't like. You can go 1,000 miles.

As LP Hartley said, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." You won't find the food any more foreign than you would find food from a different continent. Which is to say, it's a matter of taste. I like food from all over the world, and am very interested in different foodways. But if you're a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, you're probably not going to like the food of 1,000 years ago, either. Not because it's bad, but just because it's different.

We do have cookbooks that old. This one is from the late 14th century:

The Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge

Some of the dishes:

Jellied fish
Lampreys
Deer intestines (with vinegar)
Rabbits with cinnamon and raisins
Eggs with grape juice

Other recipes are more familiar, but in general they are more highly seasoned than you're used to. (Not, as the myth goes, because they were covering up rotten meat, but because they had the money to spend and they liked to show it off.) They also liked to combine sweet with savory in ways that are no longer conventional.


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from Quora http://ift.tt/2bKFX5I

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