history of food Archives - Weird History Stories

a person stands in a large excavation pit. there is a blue arrow drawn to point at the ground

Fire and Evolution

Big History / June 11, 2024 / anthropology, archaeology, evolution, folklore, folklore/mythology, history of food, mythology, pre-history, science

The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of

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Pigs in Medieval Culture

Medieval History / May 30, 2024 / animals, Christian history, history of food, Islamic history, Jewish history, women's history

Medieval culture repeatedly drew connections between animals and moralistic qualities. The pig — an animal ubiquitously eaten by Christians throughout the Middle Ages — developed an unusually bad reputation. This detail from a 15th-century prayer book shows a woman stroking a pig. While the overall image looks benign — the larger painting is all about

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A collage of medieval manuscripts depicting pigs and boars.

Pig Farming in the Middle Ages

Medieval History / May 30, 2024 / animals, environmental history, history of food, medicine

We need to talk about pig farming in the Early Middle Ages. Pigs weren’t usually the most important domesticated animal for folks living in Western Europe between 500-1000 CE, but they shaped the lives of almost everyone. In a Michael Pollan “who’s-dominating-whom,” sort of vibe, historian Jamie Kreiner’s research demonstrates that although Medieval folks of

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Homo Erectus Cooking

Ancient History, History of Science / October 31, 2023 / history of food, pre-history

My science feeds are abuzz with the story behind an article published this month of November 2022 in _Nature Ecology & Evolution_ that redates a human invention — deliberate cooking of food — to 780,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens evolved. The species Homo erectus (see first image) is the likeliest human ancestor that

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Late 17th Century British Coffeehouse

Early Modern / October 30, 2023 / history of food

Scene: a British coffeehouse from the late seventeenth century. Fact: to us, this cafe likely would have smelled far better than London’s streets, with their crowds and lack of sewage treatment. However – what we consider a pleasant aroma has changed over time. As historian of smell Mark S. R. Jenner writes, “in 1657 a

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Phytophthora Infestans and The Irish Potato Famine

Long 19th- 20th centuries / October 18, 2023 / disease, history of food

Phytophthora infestans –the micro-organism responsible for potato blight, most horrifically with the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, which depleted the population of Ireland by 30%! (A million people quickly died, and over a million migrated to the U.S.A.) There is some interesting science behind the particular virulence of this outbreak. Scientists figured out that P. Infestans

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Chicha and Ecuadorian Burials

Ancient History, Early Americas, History of Science / October 6, 2023 / history of food

You’re looking at a recreation of a funerary site from ancient Ecuador, where these three levels of human remains were unearthed in 1980 as builders were getting ready to construct an airport at the capital city of Quito: a total of nine vertical burial tunnel-chambers were found. These bodies date from 680 CE, to a

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Ancient Roman Drinking Glasses

Ancient History / September 29, 2023 / history of food, Rome

The most famous meal in Ancient Roman history might be one described in _The Satyricon_ by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Perhaps a send-up of the excessesses of Nero’s court, the book discusses an over-the-top umpteen-course meal where silver bowls are swept away with the trash, the meat dishes are each sculpted to look like something else,

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Convivencia

Fabulous Females, Medieval History / September 19, 2023 / Christian history, history of food, Islamic history, Jewish history

Here’s a cool Medieval miniature of two women playing chess: one is Muslim, the other Christian. It relates to a topic of much debate about Spain in the Middle Ages, which is: “what was the relationship among Christians, Muslims, and Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula between the 8th c CE (when Muslims from the

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Hymn to Ninsaki Tablet

Ancient History / September 18, 2023 / Eurasia/Middle Eastern history, history of food, literature

This is a tablet from Ancient Mesopotamia dating to 1800 BCE. It is a hymn to Ninsaki, the goddess of beer. It is also a beer recipe. Some scholars think that beer might have been invented even before bread – whether this is true or not, beer was super important (calories, socialization, nutrients, safer than

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Einkorn Wheat

Africa, Asia and South Asia, Ancient History / September 18, 2023 / Eurasia/Middle Eastern history, history of food

This wild grass was of the first plants humans intentionally harvested. Einkorn’s seeds scatter more easily than modern wheat, and they are smaller as well. This plant flourished in modern northern Syria and northern Iraq.

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Mongolian Golden Cup

Africa, Asia and South Asia / September 18, 2023 / history of food

This is a Mongolian golden cup from the 13-14th centuries. Mongols liked to drink fermented mare’s milk. Source: https://gbtimes.com/airag-more-than-merely-mongolian-mares-milk

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Winemaking in Medieval Europe

Medieval History / August 27, 2023 / Early Middle Ages, history of food

Medieval people drank wine, and a lot of it. Some speculate that it would have tasted much worse than today’s drink, because it wasn’t stored in glass bottles, and corks hadn’t been invented. This might have made older wines murky with dead yeasts, and easily spoiled. The best wines likely were the newer ones which

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Garum, Ancient Rome’s Favorite Flavor

Ancient History, Byzantine History / August 23, 2023 / history of food, Rome

Any gastro-historians out there? This post is about a favorite component of Ancient Roman cooking that likely was as pervasive as kimchee in modern Korean cuisine, and I am talking about garum, a sauce and made out of decaying, briny fish. The picture you see here is of a garum-producing factory in the Ancient city

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Ancient Roman Focaccia?

Ancient History / August 22, 2023 / art, history of food, Rome

Just a reminder — since 2017, the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii (which was infamously buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE) has undergone extensive excavations in several new areas. And in “Regio IX” this week, the first scholarly analysis of this painting appeared, and the interwebs are all a-flutter as to

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