✔️ Forgotten Flavors – Bringing Back Lost Recipes from History

✨A unique culinary experience that revives extinct recipes from ancient civilizations, lost cultures, and forgotten cookbooks—allowing people to taste food that hasn’t been eaten for centuries.

#AncientRecipes #HistoricalDining #LostFlavors #CulinaryArchaeology #FoodHistory

The real #Paleo diet: New #archaeological evidence changes what we thought about how ancient humans prepared food

by Ceren Kabukcu, The Conversation, November 26, 2022

"We found carbonised food fragments in Franchthi Cave (Aegean, Greece) dating to about 13,000-11,500 years ago. At Franchthi Cave we found one fragment from a finely-ground food which might be #bread, batter or a type of #porridge in addition to #pulse #seed-rich, coarse-ground foods.

"In Shanidar Cave (Zagros, Iraqi Kurdistan), associated with early modern humans around 40,000 years ago and Neanderthals around 70,000 years ago, we also found ancient food fragments. This included wild #mustard and terebinth (wild #pistachio) mixed into foods. We discovered wild #grass seeds mixed with pulses in the charred remains from the Neanderthal layers. Previous studies at Shanidar found traces of grass seeds in the tartar on Neanderthal teeth.

"At both sites, we often found ground or pounded pulse seeds such as bitter #vetch (Vicia ervilia), grass #pea (Lathyrus spp) and wild pea (Pisum spp). The people who lived in these caves added the seeds to a mixture that was heated up with water during grinding, pounding or mashing of soaked seeds.

"The majority of wild pulse mixes were characterised by bitter tasting mixtures. In modern cooking, these pulses are often soaked, heated and de-hulled (removal of the seed coat) to reduce their bitterness and toxins. The ancient remains we found suggest humans have been doing this for tens of thousands of years. But the fact seed coats weren't completely removed hints that these people wanted to retain a little of the bitter flavour.

"The presence of wild mustard, with its distinctive sharp taste, is a seasoning well documented in the Aceramic period (the beginning of village life in the south-west Asia, 8500BC) and later Neolithic sites in the region. Plants such as wild almonds (bitter), terebinth (tannin-rich and oily) and wild #fruits (sharp, sometimes sour, sometimes tannin-rich) are pervasive in plant remains from south-west Asia and Europe during the later Paleolithic period (40,000-10,000 years ago). Their inclusion in dishes based on grasses, #tubers, meat, fish, would have lent a special flavour to the finished meal. So these plants were eaten for tens of thousands of years across areas thousands of miles apart. These dishes may be the origins of human culinary practices.

"Based on the evidence from plants found during this time span, there is no doubt both #Neanderthals and early modern humans diets included a variety of plants. Previous studies found food residues trapped in tartar on the teeth of Neanderthals from Europe and south-west Asia which show they cooked and ate grasses and tubers such as wild #barley, and medicinal plants. The remains of carbonised plants remains show they gathered pulses and pine nuts."

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological-evidence.html

#Paleolithic #Archaeobotany #FoodArchaeology #FoodHistory #History #Histodon #CulinaryArchaeology

#Archaeology: 1,800-Year-Old #Spices Are Earliest Evidence of #Curry Making in #SoutheastAsia

#Archaeologists found evidence of spices such as turmeric and cloves from ancient #Vietnam, suggesting South Asians shared their culinary traditions via an ancient maritime trade route

By Timmy Broderick on July 21, 2023

"Traces of eight spices were found: turmeric, ginger, fingerroot (Chinese ginger, lesser galangal), sand ginger (aromatic ginger), galangal (a relative of ginger and turmeric), clove, nutmeg and cinnamon. (One nutmeg fragment even retained a faint version of its signature pungent, slightly nutty aroma.) Because most of these spices originated on distant islands, traders would have had to bring them from several thousand kilometers away by sea. Hung says the stone tools were also likely imported, which suggests the larger culinary practice of incorporating such spices into foods was also borrowed from another ancient culture. 'This study reveals that trading activities were rather complicated, as not only precious goods were moving around, but also people and their entire set of culinary cultures were transferred between the regions,' she says."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/curry-has-been-a-global-phenomenon-for-millenia/

#FoodHistory #History #Histodon #CulinaryArchaeology #Archaeobotany