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#history of cooking
boldlybeyond · 11 months
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HISTORY OF COOKING , खाना पकाने का इतिहास
Cooking has been a part of human records for as long as we've existed as a species. Early humans learned to cook meals over open fires, which helped to make it extra digestible and also killed harmful bacteria.
The earliest evidence of cooking comes from burnt animal bones observed in caves in Africa, which date lower back to round 2 million years ago. Through the years, humans advanced extra state-of-the-art cooking strategies, along with boiling and roasting, and commenced to apply pottery to cook and store food.
As civilizations developed, so did their cuisines. The historic Egyptians, Greeks, and romans all had wonderful culinary traditions, and those have been motivated by the ingredients available of their areas as well as via exchange with other cultures. Read More
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copperbadge · 10 months
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Some photos of the “food” section of the Pompeii exhibit at the MSI. I found this section especially fascinating because 1. I love food but also 2. People really are just gonna people. That frying pan, which I think is bronze, looks like the cast iron frying pan I cook with. Next to it is a strainer that’s actually very similar to my mesh strainer and if I could buy one like that today, I would. 
That large orange terracotta bowl is two thousand years old and looks like something you could buy in a bougie home goods store today. 
The last photo is recognizable to most people with a tumblr and a passing interest in history as a loaf of Roman bread -- it has the classic round shape with scoring across the top and an indentation around the edge where it was baked with a cord wrapped around it. It’s a copy of course, but it’s a resin cast of an actual loaf of bread recovered from Pompeii. As a bread baker myself I spent quite a while studying it. 
[ID: Three photos; top, a display of cookware including a modern-looking likely-bronze skillet, a small, deep strainer with a long handle, and an angular, deep cooking pot. Lower left, a bright orange bowl with a flat bottom, high rim, and decorative printing on the outside; it has been cleaned and shines with a high red burnish. Lower right, the bread loaf appears as a round black disc with score marks around the edge and on the top.]
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thoodleoo · 6 months
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if i ever went back in time to ancient greece or rome i would bring a camera and just let them go hog wild taking pictures. i don't even mean the pericleses or the caesars i wanna see what demetrios son of costas does in the agora with a selfie stick and 100 gb of storage. i need to know what stupid pictures publius faustus the shepherd is going to take of his buddy menalcas getting his ass headbutted by a goat
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alpaca-clouds · 4 months
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How to cook in a medieval setting
Alright. As some of the people, who follow me for a longer while know... I do have opinions about cooking in historical settings. For everyone else a bit of backstory: When I was still LARPing, I would usually come to LARP as a camp cook, making somewhat historically accurate food and selling it for ingame coin. As such I know a bit about how to cook with a historical set up. And given I am getting so much into DnD and DnD stories right now, let me share a bit for those who might be interested (for example for stories and such).
🍲Cooking at Home
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First things first: For the longest time in history most people did not have actual kitchens. Because actual kitchens were rather rare. Most people cooked their food over their one fireplace at home, which looked something like what you see above. There was something made of metal hanging over the fireplace. At times this was on hinges and movable, at times it was set in place. You could hang pots and kettles over it. When it came to pans, people either had a mount they would put over the fire or some kind of grid they could easily put into place there with some sourts of mounts (like the two metal thingies you can see above).
If you have a modern kitchen, you are obviously used to cook on several cooktops (for most people it is probably four of them), while in this historical you obviously only had one fire. Of course, as you can also see in the picture above, you could often put two smaller pots over the flames or put in a pan onto the fire additionally. But yes, the way we cook in modern times is very different.
Because of this a lot of people often ate stews and soups of sort. You could make those in just one pot - and often could eat from the same stew for days. In a lot of taverns the people had an "everything stew" going, which worked on the idea that everyone just brought their food leftovers, which were all put into one pot everyone would eat from.
Now, some alert readers might have also noticed something: What about bread and pastries? If you only have one fireplace and no oven, how did people make bread?
Well, there were usually three different methods for this. The most common one was communal ovens. Often people had one communal oven in a neighborhood. Especially in a village there might just be a communal oven everyone would just put their bread in to bake. (Though often this oven would only be fired up once or twice a week.)
The second version to deal with this some people used was a sort of what we today call a dutch oven. A pot made either of metal or clay with a lit you would put into the hot coals and then put bread or pastries into that, baking it like that.
There was also a version where people just baked bread in pans on the fire, rotating the bread during the baking process. At least some written accounts we have seem to imply. (Never tried this method, though. I have no idea how this might work. My camp bread was mostly done in dutch ovens or as stickbread.)
Keep in mind that the fireplace at home was very important for the people in historical times. Because it was their one source of warmth in the house.
🏕️ Cooking at Camp
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Technically speaking cooking at camp is not that different - with the exception of course that you have to drag all your supplies along. And while in Baldur's Gate 3 and most other videogames you can carry around several sets of full-plate armor and several pounds of ingredients so that dear Gale can whip something up... In real life as an adventurer running around you need to make decisions on what to take along.
If you have read Lord of the Rings, you might remember how many people have criticized Sam for actually dragging all his cooking supplies along and how sad he was for not being able to cook for most of the time, because they were very limited in taking ingredients along.
So, yes, if you are an adventurer who is camping out in the open, you will probably need to do a lot of hunting and gathering to eat during your travels. You can take food for a couple of days along, but not for a lot.
A special challenge is of course, that while you can cook food for several days when you are at homes, you do not want to drag along a prepared stew for several days. So usually you will cook in smaller batches.
A lot of people who were journeying would often just take along one or two pots along.
So, what would you eat as an adventurer travelling around while trying to save the world from some evil forces? Well, it would depend on the time of the year of course. You would probably hunt yourself some food. For example hares, birds or squirrels. Mostly small things you can eat within one or two days. You do not want to drag along half a dead deer. In the warm months you might also forrage for all sorts of greens. You also can cook with many sorts of roots. Of course you can also always look into berries and other fruits you might find.
Things you might bring with you might be salt and some spices. A good thing to bring along would be herbs for tea, too, because I can tell you from experience that water you might have gotten from a river does not always taste very well - and springs with fresh water are often not accessible.
Now, other than what you can access the basic ideas of camping fires and cooking with them has not changed in the last few thousand years. While modern people camping usually have a car nearby and hence will have access to a lot of ingredients. But the general ideas of how to build a fire and put a pot over it... has not really changed.
So, yeah.
Just keep in mind that for the most part in historical settings until fairly recently, there was not much terms of proper kitchens. People cooked over an open fire and hence had to get at times ingenius about it.
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leatherandmossprints · 7 months
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“How calm, how solemn it grows to ascend the atmosphere of lovers”
Illustration for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ by artist Margaret C. Cook.
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yesterdaysprint · 2 months
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Lewiston Evening Journal, Maine, January 20, 1917
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oldschoolfrp · 1 month
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In the beginning there was Dungeons and Dragons™ -- Original Dungeons and Dragons, later called the Collector's Edition. Then there were Greyhawk and Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry, which were essentially Expanded Original D&D. Then came Advanced D&D (which was advanced Original D&D), and Basic D&D (which was basic Original D&D). And ultimately, we have Expert D&D, which is expert Basic D&D, not expert Original D&D, or expert Advanced D&D; and Expert Basic D&D brings it all to the same approximate scope as Original D&D. One gets the impression that the TSR crew spends its off-hours designing mazes for rats to become lost in.
Aaron Allston summarizes the history of D&D editions through the first 8 years, from the opening paragraph of his review of Cook & Marsh's Expert D&D rules in The Space Gamer 38, April 1981. His review is generally positive, noting that it is much better edited while fixing some but not all problems with the original game:
I wish I had had the Basic D&D series when I began gaming. The rules sets are legible, indexed, punched for 3-hole notebooks, reorganizable, and, best of all, understandable. One actually can learn the game from the rules, something not possible with Original D&D. That is, however, perhaps the most annoying part about this set of rules. With sufficient playtesting, it could have been released seven or eight years ago, instead of the original set. This series is the product of hindsight.
The complete 1981 B/X D&D (Moldvay's Basic and Cook & Marsh's Expert) remains one of the best-loved early versions of D&D, directly inspiring many of the OSR clones like Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials.
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thejoyofseax · 9 months
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Why We Can't Have Medieval Food
I noted in a previous post that I'd "expand on my thinking on efforts to reproduce period food and how we’re just never going to know if we have it right or not." Well, now I have 2am sleep?-never-heard-of-it insomnia, so let's go.
At the fundamental level, this is the idea that you can't step in the same river twice. You can put your foot down at the same point in space, and it'll go into water, but that's different water, and the bed of the river has inevitably changed, even a little, from the last time you did so.
Our ingredients have changed. This is not just because we can't get the fat from fat-tailed sheep in Ireland, or silphium at all anywhere, although both of those are true. But the aubergine you buy today is markedly different to the aubergine that was available even 40 years ago. You no longer need to salt aubergine slices and draw out the bitter fluids, which was necessary for pretty much all of the thing's existence before (except in those cultures that liked the bitter taste). The bitterness has been bred out of them. And the old bitter aubergine is gone. Possibly there are a few plants of it preserved in some archive garden, or a seed bank, or something, but I can't get to those.
We don't really have a good idea of the plant called worts in medieval English recipes. I mean, we know (or we're fairly sure) it was brassica oleracea. But that one species has cultivars as distinct as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan (list swiped from Wikipedia). And even within "cabbage" or "kale", you have literally dozens of varieties. If you plant the seeds from a brassica, unless you've been moderately careful with pollination, you won't get the same plant as the seeds are from. You can crossbreed brassicas just by planting them near each other and letting them flower. And of course there is no way to determine what varietal any medieval village had, a very high likelihood that it was different to the village next door, and an exceedingly high chance that that varietal no longer exists. Further, it only ever existed for a few tens of years - before it went on cross-breeding into something different. So our access to medieval worts (or indeed, cabbage, kale, etc) is just non-existant.
Some other species within the brassica genus are as varied. Brassica rapa includes oilseed rape, field mustard, turnip, Chinese cabbage, and pak choi.
We have an off-chance, as it happens, of getting almost the same kind of apple as some medieval varieties, because apples can only be reproduced for orchard use by grafting, which is essentially cloning. Identification through paintings, DNA analysis, and archaeobotany sometimes let us pin down exactly which apple was there. But the conditions under which we grow those apples are probably not the same as the medieval orchard. Were they thinned? When were they harvested? How were they stored? And apples are pretty much the best case.
Medieval wheat was practically a different plant. It was far pickier about where it would grow, and frequently produced 2-4 grains per stalk. A really good year had 6-8. In modern conditions, any wheat variety with less than 30 grains per stalk would be considered a flop.
Meats are worse. Selective breeding in the last century has absolutely and completely changed every single species of livestock, and if you follow that back another five centuries, some of them would be almost unrecognisable. Even our heritage breeds are mostly only about 200 years old.
Cheese, well. Cheese is dependent on very specific bacteria, and there are plenty of conditions where the resulting cheese is different depending on whether it was stored at the back or front of the cave. Yogurts, quarks, skyrs, etc, are also live cultures, and almost certainly vary massively. (I have a theory about British cheese here, too, which I'll expand on in a future post)
So, even before you go near the different cooking conditions (wood, burnables like camel and cow dung, smoke, the material and condition of cooking pots), we just can't say with any reliability that the food we're making now is anything like medieval people produced from the same recipe. We can't even say that with much reliability over a century.
Under very controlled conditions, you could make an argument for very specific dishes. If you track down a wild mountain sheep in Afghanistan, and use water from a local spring, and salt from some local salt mine, then you can make a case that you can produce something fairly close to the original ma wa milh, the water-and-salt stew that forms the most basic dish in Arabic cookery. But once you start introducing domestic livestock, vegetables, or even water from newer wells, you're now adrift.
It is possible that some dishes taste exactly the same, by coincidence. But we can't determine that. We can't compare the taste of a dish from five years ago, let alone five hundred, because we're only just getting to a state where we can "record" a taste accurately. Otherwise it's memory and chance.
We've got to be at peace with this. We can put in the best efforts we can, and produce things that are, in spirit, like the medieval dishes we're reading about. But that's as good as it gets.
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soulsforscrapbooks · 2 years
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Dracula Daily was mentioned in the New York Times magazine! The reference, of course, had to do with paprika
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facts-i-just-made-up · 2 months
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currently enjoying a delicious bowl of stew. how about some equally delicious stew facts?
Please remember that I never, ever do requests and thus will not give you any stew facts like these:
Stew is the oldest known cooked meal, predating not only the invention of cooking, but also fire, water, and the act of eating.
Stew was once thought to have been made by cooking ingredients in a fluid that would then be served together, but we now know that such myths are false, as it really comes from tin cans at supermarkets and corner stores.
Stew is named after Stewart C. Eintopf, who found the first stew of the modern era in a pot on a Pacific island. The stew had a local name and recipe, but Eintopf simply took the idea, named it after himself, and made a similar looking stew with no spices or other flavorings. He is still considered the greatest man in British culinary history, despite not being a cook, not being British, and not being a historical figure, he will be born in 2043.
Turtles are technically stew before they are made into turtle stew, as they come in their own affixed bowls.
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vintagecamping · 14 days
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Pan frying some dinner on a hand made stove.
Louisiana
1940
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mastersoftheair · 22 days
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from appletv's instagram
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readyforevolution · 6 months
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A very young Aretha with her biggest crush (and musical idol), Sam Cooke, possibly an early 1960s photo (1963, 1964-ish)
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aceforwhatevenisthis · 6 months
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night at the museum puppet history au
okay so
Ryan is the new night guard at a children's history museum, it's full of funny puppets most roughly the size of what the new professor puppet is now (some smaller, some bigger)
and much like Larry, he very quickly finds out that these puppets come to life at night and i mean, yeah he freaks out, it's life-size puppets coming to life, that's not exactly non-creepy
Shane is the curator of the museum and likes to make jokes about how the puppets seem to have a life of their own sometimes (Ryan isn't sure if he knows about what happens at night in the museum but Shane absolutely knows)
The main point of the museum is that it hosts various educational talks about history appropriate for small kids right and Shane is just one of the many puppeteers (he usually controls the Professor) but once Ryan makes friends with the puppets, the Professor and co. like to teach Ryan about the more obscure and non-PG history that we get in the actual show (idk about you but cannibalism and death is not exactly kid friendly and the Professor has been dying to tell someone about all this history he knows)
that's all i have for now
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dirtytransmasc · 12 days
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the Sully kids' reaction to Jake saying Spider "knew everything" breaks my heart.
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they knew him better than anyone else, better than their parents. they knew his love for Eywa, for Pandora, for The People, for the clan, for their family. they knew he would never tell the RDA anything... not willingly at least.
they knew they were leaving because Spider would be tortured for information, he'd be forced to reveal their home, their plans, their numbers, their weaknesses. their brother would be tortured and they were being forced to leave him behind.
they knew they were being forced to find a new home, without their brother, because their dad knew he would be tortured.
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animentality · 5 days
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