I don’t think people really realize how much food has changed in the past few centuries. I was talking with this Pakistani dude and he was telling me about this traditional dish. Like half the ingredients were from the Columbian exchange.
The amount and variety of spices we have is just crazy in a historical context. For most humans for most of human history, meals consisted of grains in a pot, whatever veggies you could scrounge up (which looked very little like they do today), and a little meat if you were lucky.
Same thing in Italy. We act like our traditional dishes are something we’ve been eating for centuries while almost all of them became a thing after WWII, during the economic boom, when a lot of people became able to afford a larger variety of ingredients, the cold chain became efficient, and we started to import recipes and food from foreign countries, and anyway the original and popular version of some classics was completely different from what we eat today and consider traditional. It is still true that many dishes are peculiar of our traditional cousine, but the way we act about it is just patriotic nonsense. Pasta itself might be historically considered more of an us italian-american thing than an italian dish
Well at least our Finnish national dish is still traditional. Take cubed beef and pork. Put them in water. Add salt. Put on heat for a sufficient amount of time.
That’s it.
Fancy modern versions have peppers and whatnot but traditionally it’s just salt.
I don’t think people really realize how much food has changed in the past few centuries. I was talking with this Pakistani dude and he was telling me about this traditional dish. Like half the ingredients were from the Columbian exchange.
The amount and variety of spices we have is just crazy in a historical context. For most humans for most of human history, meals consisted of grains in a pot, whatever veggies you could scrounge up (which looked very little like they do today), and a little meat if you were lucky.
Same thing in Italy. We act like our traditional dishes are something we’ve been eating for centuries while almost all of them became a thing after WWII, during the economic boom, when a lot of people became able to afford a larger variety of ingredients, the cold chain became efficient, and we started to import recipes and food from foreign countries, and anyway the original and popular version of some classics was completely different from what we eat today and consider traditional. It is still true that many dishes are peculiar of our traditional cousine, but the way we act about it is just patriotic nonsense. Pasta itself might be historically considered more of an us italian-american thing than an italian dish
Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.
Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.
Well at least our Finnish national dish is still traditional. Take cubed beef and pork. Put them in water. Add salt. Put on heat for a sufficient amount of time.
That’s it.
Fancy modern versions have peppers and whatnot but traditionally it’s just salt.
Salt. Don’t forget the SALT
Doh!