cuisine and empire

I think my first blog blog, as opposed to LiveJournal or whatever other platforms I may have forgotten, was a cooking blog. I have cooked for a fair bit. About thirty years, I suppose, but only on the regular for about ... well, twenty-five years, then. From the latter part of high school on, I've cooked the overwhelming majority of the meals I've eaten, and sometime long after people said I was good at it, I started actually being good at it. The Food Network came and went (I realize it's still broadcasting, but come on). I had a few blogs. At one point or another I've made most things from scratch that don't require a still or a grain mill.

I think about cooking a lot, is the thing. I wouldn't do it if it weren't something that intrigued me. Or I suppose I would do, but I'd do it differently, you know -- I wouldn't cook the way that I do, which is a whole thing we don't need to get into here. I think about flavor, I think about technique, I think about context, and because I'm a historian, I think about history.

There aren't a whole lot of book-length histories of cuisine out there. It's a slightly more popular topic for microhistory -- you can find a number of different histories of coffeehouses, tea, pizza -- and there has been a small but promising uptick (maybe too small, maybe I shouldn't spook it) in books about immigrant cuisines in the United States in the last decade or so, which is very very cool. But there are only a handful of broad histories of cuisine overall, of which Reay Tannahill's is probably still the canonical.

Rachel Laudan's Cuisine and Empire is a valuable addition to the field. It differs from Tannahill quite deliberately in that Tannahill (writing in the 70s, perhaps relevantly) primarily organizes her work by country (or empire), while Laudan emphasizes the contacts between cultures.

This is a huge book, and by its nature not something can be summarized, so there will be a lot of detail that I skip over here because I just didn't think to dogear it.

It's been some decades since Tannahill's book, and in that time there has been considerable activity on the matter of cooking in prehistory. Most famously, Richard Wrangham has proposed that cooking actually predates us -- us meaning H. sapiens anyway, and that Homo erectus first cooked its food nearly two million years ago. Further, Wrangham argues that, as the subtitle of his book Catching Fire would have it, Cooking Made Us Human -- that it was our discovery of cooking that drove human evolution on a path divergent from the other primates, one that led not only to less time foraging but less time eating. Chimpanzees spend need to spend five hours a day chewing their food in order to get enough energy to get through that day. Cooking not only softens food (and in the case of many ingredients, increase bio-availability of many nutrients, and of course neutralizes many toxins), it's Wrangham's view that an early development of cooking contributed to numerous evolutionary advantages, including a more efficient digestive tract. This is not a universally held view, mainly because there is insufficient archaeological evidence to compel it, but it is more widely accepted that our various masteries of eating -- cooking, hunting, and much much later agriculture -- contributed to brain growth.

Our modern expectation to eat "fresh" and "natural" foods is possible only because we eat foods out of season -- radically out of season, in senses incomprehensible to the past: we not only rapidly transport food across the world from where it is grown or raised to where it is eaten, we not only refrigerate food to extend its freshness, we alter the natural life cycles of animals in order to have meat and dairy on demand, and we've spent thousands of years breeding both animals and plants for more desirable food traits. Plant-based foods take longer to spoil and are more resistant to pests; meat is more abundant; dairy is sweeter.

Humankind is possible only because of unfresh food, of course, preserved food, smoked, dried, salted, fermented. Grain that's been in the granary for months. Dried out meat you have to boil for a few hours before it's soft enough that you can eat it. Different peoples faced different challenges of climate, and had access to different food resources -- those differences, ultimately, account for the earliest cuisines, which is to say, sets of cooking methods, techniques, habits, and technologies characteristic of a given region or culture.

Laudan classifies cooking operations into four groups: "changing temperature (heating and cooling); encouraging biochemical activity (fermenting); changing chemical characteristics by treating with water, acids, and alkalis (leaching and marinating, for instance); and changing the size and shape of the raw materials using mechanical force (cutting, grinding, pounding, and grating, for example)." It's an important reminder in part because until we get to the fairly recent past, cooks had to do much more of this than they do now; most purchased ingredients are already heavily processed, though we don't think of them that way. Even at farmer's markets, for instance, many of the vegetables have been washed (even if not as efficiently as supermarket vegetables are), and possibly trimmed. But that's the most minor example compared to the preparation of grains -- which required hours of work for every day's worth of food -- or meat. "Take meat, for example. A carcass has to be skinned before meat can be cut from the bone and then into portions. These may then be eaten, or subjected to heat and then eaten, or frozen and dried or fermented so that they can be eaten at a later date." Food historians generally refer to those preliminary operations as "processing," although moderns tend to think of "processed food" as spray cheese and Tofurkey.

The stories of the earliest cities are the stories of cuisines based primarily on grains and roots -- and really, the Neolithic Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, might better be called the Grain Revolution, because while it is sometimes simply described as "when people started planting crops," which led to permanent settlements instead of nomadic hunting and gathering, it was mastery of grain that made this possible, and it occurs relatively late in the history of cooking (especially if we accept Wrangham's view) because dealing with grain is so fucking difficult. There's some debate about whether we may have been grain-foragers before we were grain-planters -- I mean, presumably we had to have been, but the debate is about how long that went on -- but in the grand scale of things it doesn't make much difference. Grain is fucking difficult. The seeds are very small and very hard and even once you deal with them, you still need to process them further to eat them. (Keep in mind that even gathering fuel for cooking fires was a lot of work and time.)

As Laudan points out, "Cities, states, and armies appeared only in regions of grain cuisines. When they did, grain cuisine splintered into subcuisines for powerful and poor, town and country, settled populations and nomads. A feast following a sacrifice to the gods was the emblematic meal everywhere, the meal that represented and united the society, as Thanksgiving now does in the United States. It is not clear whether these global parallels reflect widespread contact between societies, the logic of emerging social organization, or a combination of the two."

That last sentence sums up a lot of history and anthropology, incidentally. Don't trust anyone who insists that when you find X and sort-of-X in two places, it must be because contact between the two places transmitted X. That recent study claiming ancient origins for Little Red Riding Hood et al based on phylogenetic analyses? Don't take it at its word.

Anyway, the crazy difficulty of grain (even apart from how much more difficult it is earlier in history at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution): "Steamed broomcorn millet and foxtail millet, tiny round grains from disparate boanical genera, were the basis of the first cuisine we encounter in the Yellow River Valley in ancient China. There peasants lived in small villages, their dwellings half buried in the ground and roofed with thick thatch to protect against the freezing winters, and the interiors crammed with grain and preserved vegetables. Small patches of millet dotted the valley's fertile yellow soil, which was brought by floods and winds from the steppe. To prepare the millet, peasants lifted heavy pestles high above mortars and let them fall repeatedly until the inedible outer hulls were cracked. Beginning around the first century BCE, they used foot-trodden pestles to pound grain in a mortar buried in the ground, a less demanding method. When all the hulls were cracked, they tossed the grains in a basket, winnowing away the lighter hulls. Then they steamed the grains until they were light and fluffy in three-legged pots set over small fires, a method that conserved scarce fuel. Before dipping their fingers into the communal bowl, they offered a little to the gods and the ancestors. They accompanied the millet with bites of pickled vegetables, cabbage of various kinds, mallow, water-shield (an aquatic plant), or bamboo shoots, seasoned and preserved with costly salt. Sometimes, when they had trapped small wild animals, they had a bit of boiled or steamed meat, seasoned with Chinese chives, Chinese dates, or sour apricots."

By this point, other grains had been introduced to the region from the Fertile Crescent -- wheat and barley, collectively referred to as mai -- but were unpalatably tough and chewy when prepared like millet, and were usually eaten only in lean times, like the months before the new harvest, when last year's millet stock began to run low.

A more elaborate sacrificial feast:

"Servants set out mats of aromatic reeds, small stools to support the diners' elbows, and dishes of bronze, wood, bamboo, and pottery. Meat on the bone and grain went on the left of each setting, sliced meat, drinks, and syrups on the right, and around them minced and roast meats, onions, and drinks were arranged in a symmetrical pattern. After making an offering to the ancestors, the king and the nobles knelt to eat, each man's seniority and valor in battle determining where he knelt and what pieces of meat he was entitled to. The warriors took morsels of the drier dishes with their fingers: meats marinated in vinegar, fried, and served over millet or rice; jerky spiced with brown pepper; and jerky seasoned with ginger, cinnamon, and salt. They scooped up keng, a stew soured with vinegar or sour apricots (Prunus mume, the "plums" of plum sauce). They nibbled on small cubes of raw beef, cured in chiu, and served with pickles, vinegar, or the juice of sour apricots; on meatballs of rice and pork, mutton, or beef; and on the much-sought-after roasted, fat-wrapped dog's liver."

But up above, we mentioned roots too, not just grains. The tropical monsoon region begins a few hundred miles south of the Yellow River Valley, and included both a root cuisine and a rice cuisine, about which much less is known than the Yellow River Valley cuisine. "To begin with the root cuisine, taro, yam, and the cooking banana (the starchy, high-yielding fruit of Musa spp., as well as its root) were boiled or steamed, and most likely pounded to pastes that could be scooped up with the fingers. People on the oceanic side of New Guinea loaded outriggers with the basics of this culinary package and sailed east into the Pacific. To sustain themselves at sea, they stowed lightweight, long-lasting dried or fermented fish, breadfruit, and bananas for food. They filled gourds and bamboo sections with water, and drank the water inside coconuts. They packed slips, cuttings, young plants, and taro and yams in moist moss, then wrapped them in a covering such as leaves or bark cloth, tucked them into palm-leaf casings, and hung them out of reach of salt spray. Breeding pairs of pigs, chickens, and dogs, which, if worst came to worst, could be eaten on the way, were carried on board. Between 1400 and 900 BCE, they settled many of the South Pacific Islands."

Another sacrificial feast, in Mesopotamia (followed by some general detail):

"A sacrificial feast included sauces, sweets, and appetizers, hallmarks of high cuisine. Fried grasshoppers or locusts made tasty appetizers. Pickles and condiments concocted from seeds, sesame oil, vegetables, fruits, garlic, turnip, onion, nuts, and olives titillated the palate. Sauces were prepared from an onion-and-garlic flavoring base combined with a rich fatty broth thickened with breadcrumbs, the ancestors of sauces still served in the Middle East and even of present-day English bread sauce. Pomegranates, grapes, dates, and confections of milk, cheese, honey, and pistachios provided a sweet touch.

"Professional cooks labored in kitchens that were as large as three thousand square feet, much of the space devoted to making grain-based dishes, bread, and beer. From the coarse groats and fine flour provided by the grinders -- perhaps prisoners and convicts -- cooks prepared porridge, flatbreads, and slightly leavened breads, the latter in three hundred named varieties. Dough was shaped into the form of hearts, hands, and women's breasts, seasoned with spices, and filled with fruit, with the texture often softened by oil, milk, ale, or sweeteners. A flour-oil pastry was enlivened with dates, nuts, or spices such as cumin or coriander. Stuffed pastries were pressed into an oiled pottery mold with a design on the bottom before baking. Flatbreads were baked on the inside walls of large ceramic pots. There is some evidence that bulgur, an easy to cook food, was made by drying parboiled wheat.

"To feed the cities, barley was shipped along rivers and canals. Onions of various kinds, garlic, herbs such as rue, and fruits such as apples, pears, figs, pomegranates, and grapes came from the gardens of the wealthy. The animals were driven to the city, where they were slaughtered, the lambs and the kids going to the temples and noble houses, the male sheep and goats to the officials, royalty, and nobles, the tough ox and ewe meat to the army, and the carcasses of donkeys to the dogs, perhaps royal hunting dogs. Saltwater fish, turtles, and shellfish came from the salt marshes and the Persian Gulf. Dried fish, probably a specialized and regulated industry, came from the Persian Gulf and from as far away as Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus and the Arabian Sea. Salt, excavated from the mountains or evaporated from briny springs and brackish river water, was shipped to distribution centers and packed onto asses, probably in standard-sized, solid-footed goblets.

"Barley was wealth. It paid for the meat and cheeses. It paid for the lapis lazuli and carnelian dishes for the sacrifice, the gold and silver for jewelry, the boatloads of copper that came down the Euphrates or from Dilmun on the Persian Gulf, the metals from Oman and the Sinai, the granite and marble from Turkey and Persia, and the lumber from Lebanon used to build the temples.

"Nomads around the fringes of the irrigated and cultivated areas included the Hebrews, whose daily fare large comprised barley pottages flavored with greens and herbs and flatbreads of barley and wheat, which they farmed in oases during the growing season or acquired by bartering their barren ewes and young rams. They made yogurt and fresh cheese from the milk of their flocks, which they ate accompanied by olive or sesame oil, honey, and grape must and date sweeteners (both of which were also called honey). To conserve their flocks, the source of their wealth, they enjoyed meat only on special occasions following the sacrifice of the 'fruit of the ground' (barley and wheat) and the 'firstlings of the flock' (lambs and kids) to Jehovah."

On various uses of grain:

"The ancient Romans built their empire on barley porridge. The Chinese enjoy rice porridge, the Indians rice and lentil porridge. Polenta (millet and later maize porridge) has sustained generations of Italian peasants. Similarly, grits and mushes were staples of the American colonies. Turkish families commemorate Noah's rescue from the flood with a porridge of mixed grains, fruit, and nuts. Left to sour or ferment slightly, boiled grain dishes became tangy, a flavor much appreciated in eastern Europe, for example.

"Bread -- baked flour and water paste -- was much more portable, but it needed more fuel. Early bread was nothing like our puffy square loaf. Because so much of the bran had to be sifted out to make white flour, white bread was reserved for the very rich until the nineteenth century. Most bread was dark and flat, made of one or more of the hard grains, such as barley, wheat, oats, and later rye, often with some mixture of beans and the starchier nuts, such as chestnuts or acorns.

"To run a city-state or provision an army, rulers had to make sure that grains were extracted from those who worked the land, then transported to cities and put in storage. Sometimes they demanded grain as tribute; sometimes they operated what were in effect agribusinesses farmed by slaves, serfs, or other barely free labor to produce grain; and later they exacted taxes to be paid in grain. Grains, more important, if less glamorous, than the precious metals, exotic wild animals, and beautiful slave girls that they also collected, were processed and redistributed to the ruler's household and bodyguard as pay in kind. Kings, emperors, landlords, and the great religious houses continued to collect grain long after money was invented."

More on the sheer labor of cooking:

"Before beginning to cook, women had to gather scraps of brush, seaweed, dung, furze -- anything that would burn. Steaming and boiling, which use the least fuel, were the commonest ways of cooking. A hot meal was often prepared only once a day, other meals being cold. Water for cooking, drinking, and washing, enough for one to five gallons a day per person (contemporary Americans use about seventy-two gallons a day), had to be carried from a river or well; three gallons weigh about twenty-four pounds. Salt was a luxury, reserved for making salty preserves that accompanied salt-free porridge or bread."

On blood, beliefs about which inform ancient meat cuisines, and sacrifice:

"Blood congealed into flesh, according to the Chinese, the Hebrews, and the Greeks. It was what food finally turned into in animals, said Aristotle. Consequently few societies were neutral about blood as food: some valued it highly, others prohibited it. In the first group were nomads who harvested blood from their animals, Christians who drained the blood of carcasses and used it to make sausages or thicken sauces, and the Chinese. Even today many Hong Kong Chinese mothers feed their children blood soup to sharpen their minds before examination. In the second group were Jews and Muslims, who slaughtered animals so as to drain all blood from the body.

"The sacrifice was followed by the sacrificial feast -- humans eating the gods' leftovers, which were charged with divine power. This might mean eating the flesh of sacrificed humans, a practice motivated not by hunger but by the logic of sharing the gods' leftovers. At least some northern Europeans ate the brains of the sacrificed in the third millennium BCE. The Cocoma people of Brazil, when admonished by the Jesuits for eating their dead and drinking an alcohol laced with ground bones, reportedly said that it 'was better to be inside a friend than to be swallowed by the cold earth.' The Aztecs ate slivers of flesh from those who had been sacrificed on the pyramids. More commonly, however, the feast featured roast meat from sacrificed animals."

Eating human flesh, whether or not in the context of sacrifice, is one of those topics that's subject to a lot of controversy and misinformation. Depictions of the Aztecs as bloodthirsty cannibals, for instance, were obviously pulpy nonsense cooked up much later, but a rejection of that depiction led to a widespread rejection of the notion of any Aztec cannibalism, which is also -- from what I understand, though Mesoamerican history is not at all my area -- false. Cannibalism in times of desperation is obviously widespread in the sense that you find it in any culture, in any time or part of the world, where there is such desperation and famine. Sacrificial or ritual cannibalism is sort of a different thing, though of course some historians and anthropologists theorize that cultures that resorted to desperation-induced cannibalism frequently enough simply developed rituals around it.

Which brings us to theories of other food rituals and food rules, the best known of which in the Western world are the Jewish dietary restrictions:

"Jewish culinary rules were laid out in Leviticus and other books of the Old Testament. Blood, animals with cloven hooves unless they chewed their cud, pork, animals with both fins and scales who lived in the water, and (echoing Persian practice) insects were all forbidden as foods. So was cooking meat in milk and dining with non-Jews. Temple priests followed rules of purification before sacrifice, slaughtered animals so that the lifeblood drained out, and refrained from offering impure fermented (corrupted) foods.

"In the mid-twentieth century, scholars offered opposing interpretations of Jewish food rules, particularly the ban on pork. Marvin Harris argued that they were health measures to prevent trichinosis." The Harris theory was still widely disseminated when I was in grad school, incidentally, and vaguely familiar to a lot of people outside the field, even though it isn't very good (or perhaps because it doesn't require much information). "Mary Douglas and Jean Soler contended that they were designed to create a distinct Jewish identity. The latter interpretation squares better with the simultaneous proliferation of culinary rules in the Persian Empire and the Indian states. With limited culinary resources, identity is most easily established by banning certain foodstuffs, cooking methods, and ways of dining. Pigs, being difficult to herd, were not popular with peoples of nomadic origin, so the force of the rule probably only became fully felt centuries later when Jews became a minority in pork-eating Roman or Christian lands."

Speaking of Rome:

"Every morning and evening, Roman infantrymen prepared meals like those they would have eaten at home on the farm. They boiled wheat to make wheat porridge or wheat pottage (wheat cooked with dried peas, beans, or lentils, a bit of oil, salt, and a little salt pork), which they dipped into with wooden spoons. Or they mixed whole-wheat flour, water, and salt and baked coarse whole-wheat bread, probably in the ashes of the campfire, to eat with a bit of cheese. In the morning, these foot soldiers ate standing up like animals outside their goatskin tents. In the evening, they ate seated on the ground in the tents like children or slaves. They drank water cut with wine or vinegar. Sacrifices on festival days, before they went into battle, and to celebrate victory, added a treat of boiled or roast beef. On the move or near the enemy, biscuit -- twice cooked bread that lasted a long time -- made an instant meal."

Making that porridge or potage required soldiers to grind grain, for which pack mules carried grindstones. "One of the soldiers assembled the grindstone, placing first a skin or cloth on the ground to catch the flour, then the squat lower grooved cylindrical stone, then the top stone, which rotated over the lower one. He squatted like a woman or slave over the grindstone. With one hand he rotated the upper stone using a peg near the circumference as a handle; with the other he poured handfuls of grain into a hole in the upper stone. The grain dribbled onto the lower stone and was sheared by the movement of the upper. The flour moved toward the circumference along grooves cut in the lower stone. He could grind enough meal for an eight-man squad in about an hour and a half with this rotary grinder, compared to at least four or five hours had he used a simple grindstone.

"Adopting the rotary grindstone involved a series of tradeoffs. It ground faster. The weight of the upper stone, not the weight of the grinder, did the shearing, making the work less exhausting. On the other hand, the rotary grindstone was heavier, more expensive, and more difficult to make than a simple grindstone. Nor could it produce the fine gradations of flour that the simple grindstone could deliver. ... If every squad of eight men required a mill and if at its height, the army comprised half a million men, then some sixty thousand grindstones were lugged over the Roman roads. A millennium and a half was to pass before any other European army was as well fed."

Roman feasts during the Empire:

"The dinner included appetizers, sauced dishes, and desserts, all spurned by republicans. For appetizers, diners might have lettuce (perhaps served with an oil and vinegar dressing), sliced leeks (boiled, sliced in rounds, and dressed with oil, garum [like fish sauce], and wine), tuna garnished with eggs on rue leaves, eggs baked in the embers, fresh cheese with herbs, and olives with honeyed wine.

"For the main course, slaves brought in dishes such as red mullet roasted and served with a pine nut sauce; mussels cooked with wine, garum, and herbs; sow's udder, boiled until soft and then grilled and served with sauce; chicken with a stuffing of ground pork, boiled wheat, herbs, and eggs; and crane with turnips in an herb-flavored vinegar sauce. Exotic fare, such as a pea dish, a chicken stew, and baked lamb with a sweet-and-sour sauce, attributed to Persia, added a cosmopolitan touch.

"Typically, sauces were made by pulverizing hard spices, usually pepper or cumin, but also anise, caraway, celery seed, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, cassia, dill, mustard, poppy, and sesame, in a mortar. Nuts, such as almonds, filberts, and pine nuts, or fruits, such as dates, raisins, and plums, were added and the mass was worked to a paste. To this mixture, fresh herbs such as basil, bay, capers, garlic, fennel, ginger, juniper, lovage, mint, onion, parsley, rosemary, rue, saffron, savory, shallot, thyme, or turmeric were added, followed by garum and perhaps wine, must, honey, olive oil, or milk. The mixture was warmed to blend the tastes and sometimes thickened with wheat starch, eggs, rice, or crumbled pastry."

Outside of the Roman Empire, grain processing was as much as four times more labor-intensive, and in many parts of the world, unleavened bread (and steamed and boiled doughs in the form of pasta and dumplings, as in China) continued to be the norm. Eventually some cultures caught up to the Romans' efficiency, but beyond that, "There was to be little change in grain processing until the Industrial Revolution, and little change in the final cooking of grains until the twentieth century."

"To supplement the staple grain, oil seeds and olives were crushed in a variety of mills and mortars and pressed in a variety of presses. Sweeteners continued to be produced by many different methods -- sprouting grains (malt sugar in China), boiling down sap (palm sugar in India), boiling down fruit juices (grape and other fruit juices in the Middle East), and taking honeycombs from hives (honey in the Roman Empire). Alcoholic and lactic fermentations in the western half of Eurasia and mold ferments in the eastern half were used to make staple dishes (raised bread) and alcoholic drinks (wine, beer, and chiu) as well as to preserve foods (cheese and sausage in the Roman Empire, milk in the Middle East) and create condiments (fermented beans in China). Autolysis (self-digestion) produced garum in the Mediterranean and probably fish sauce in Southeast Asia."

An important point I brought up earlier about food processing is mentioned as we moved through the next millennium and a half:

"Cooking was a form of alchemy, the most sophisticated understanding of changes in matter then available. Cooking and alchemy used the same tools and equipment. Both sought to find the real nature or essence of a natural substance by applying the purifying power of fire. Just as a crude ore had to be refined in the fire to release the pure shining metal, so raw wheat or sugarcane had to be similarly refined to extract the pure white flour (originally "flower") or gleaming sugar. Culinary processes such as sugar refining and bread baking were thus potent metaphors for spiritual progress. Unlike our contemporary understanding of natural food as having received only minimal processing, this earlier understanding was that processing and cooking were essential to reveal what was natural."

This all reflects one of the major principles of ancient culinary philosophy: the theory of the culinary cosmos, which led to the practice of eating only cooked food (even most fruits were not often eaten uncooked in Europe, for instance), and, for those who could afford the options, to eat food that "balances the temperament," an idea that trickles down today in a lot of horseshit diets.

This balancing the temperament stuff was grounded in the idea of the "humors," or maybe it's better to think of them as both coming from the same worldview, and it informed the view of what we would now term "healthy eating." "In preparing food for their noble employers, cooks were as aware of the need to balance the humors as we are today of, say, the need to have all food groups represented. Root vegetables such as turnips were by nature earthy (dry and cold) and thus better left to peasants. Chard, onions, and fish were cold and wet, so that frying was appropriate. Mushrooms were so cold and wet that they were best avoided entirely. Melons and other fresh fruit were not much better, being very moist and thus thought likely to putrefy in the stomach. Grapes were best served dried as raisins, quinces were dried and cooked with extra sugar -- warm in humoral theory -- to make quince paste. Red wine tended to be cold and dry, so it was best served warm with added sugar and spices."

Another major principle was the hierarchical principle, which broadly called for eating according to your station in life -- a high cuisine for the court, a humble cuisine for the poor -- which roughly in this time period was extended in many parts of the world to include higher cuisine for holy men and intellectuals than for the unenlightened, rather than basing hierarchy only on overt political power.

The third ancient culinary principle was that of sacrifice, which had been largely been phased out in the Axial Age and replaced with new religious rules for eating: "these rules identified preferred ingredients and dishes, often ones believed to enhance contemplation, such as meat substitutes (fish, tofu, gluten), sweetened soft fruit and nut drinks, or stimulating drinks such as tea, coffee, and chocolate. They specified how to process an cook foods, including guidelines for slaughtering, and laid down rules about how cooks should purify themselves, whether fermented foods were acceptable, and which foods could and could not be combined. A third cluster of rules specified mealtimes, days of fasting and feasting, and who could dine with whom.

"The rules, stricter for religious elites than for ordinary believers, were formulated and reformulated for centuries because the founders of the religions, although they relied on culinary metaphors to explain beliefs and doctrines, rarely laid down clear and consistent regulations for cooking and eating. Christians, for example, were not required to fast until the fourth or fifth century. Then they were instructed to fast on about half the days of the year. Today, in the Roman Catholic Church, fasting has been reduced to a minimum."

"Even more important in the dissemination of the new cuisines were monasteries, shorthand for permanent religious houses. Like courts, they were places where all ranks of society met, from clerics to their servants and slaves. Like court kitchens, monastery kitchens were huge and complex, turning out different meals for different ranks: noble and aristocratic visitors; passing merchants, monks, and nuns; the poor and indigent; the sick; and students studying in the monastery school. ... Like courts, they invested in food-processing equipment like gristmills, oil presses, and sugar mills, processing and adding value to foodstuffs. These they sold or offered as gifts, thereby creating loyalty. Like courts, monasteries were part of networks that crossed state boundaries, in this case by the movement of religious orders and missionaries rather than marriage."

"As theocratic cuisines spread, so did their preferred raw materials: plants and sometimes animals. Particularly important were the transfers of southeastern and Chinese plants to Buddhist India, Indian plants to Buddhist China, Chinese plants to Korea and Japan, Indian plants to Islamic lands, and European plants to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Royal and monastic gardens and large estates transplanted, ennobled, and grew sugarcane, rice, grapevines, tea, coffee, and other crops essential to the new cuisines."

Here we come to one of my favorite topics in culinary history:

"Whereas culinary diffusion prior to world religions had primarily meant emulating or rejecting neighboring high cuisines, with world religions the relation between successive cuisines became more complex. 'Fusion,' the term so often used, does not do justice to the variety of interactions. One cuisine could be layered over another, as happened with the Spanish conquests in the Americas, the conquerors eating Catholic cuisine, the indigenous retaining their own cuisine. Specific dishes, techniques, plants, and animals might be adopted, as Europeans, for example, adopted distilling, confectionary, and citrus from Islam."

Oh, if I had a nickel for every dipshit going on about how some dish or approach isn't "authentic."

There is no authentic cuisine. All cuisines are in flux and ever have been. Lots of people carry around a sense of normalcy based on a sphere that extends for a couple hundred miles and a couple dozen years, and think that sense of normalcy reflects something real, something other than their memory of food they've experienced. That's not how it works. Italian food didn't suddenly become Italian food when tomatoes arrived on the boot, or when immigrants in the northeast US started making meatballs. And putting tomato sauce on that pasta for the first time, making those first giant meals of spaghetti and meatballs, didn't invalidate those meals either.

Nobody worried about this bullshit when they actually fucking cooked. It's the hobbyhorse of the dilettante.

Meanwhile! In the Mongol Empire!

"Twenty seven soups dominate the ninety-five food recipes [in Hu's Proper and Essential Things]. The centerpiece of Mongol cuisine, these soups could be quite liquid or thickened to become solid. The basic recipe went as follows:

"1: Chop meat on the bone (usually mutton, but also game such as curlew, swan, wolf, snow leopard) into pieces. Boil in a cauldron of water until tender. Strain the broth and cut up the meat.

"2: Boil the broth with a variety of thickeners, vegetables, and tsaoko cardamom.

"3: Add the meat.

"4: Season to taste with salt, coriander, and onions.

"For a traditional Mongol taste, the thickeners might be chickpeas, hulled barley, or barley meal. To give the soup a Persian touch, it was thickened with aromatic rice or chickpeas, seasoned with cinnamon, fenugreek seeds, saffron, turmeric, asafetida, attar of roses, or black pepper, and finished with a touch of wine vinegar. For a Chinese taste, it was thickened with wheat-flour dumplings and glutinous rice powder or rice-flour noodles, and flavorings of ginger, orange peel, soybean sauce, and bean paste. In this way, the soup of the khans could be adjusted to the preferences of the peoples they had conquered."

Authenticity my ass.

This is basically how pizza adapts to local culinary niches today, and of course what McDonald's does internationally.

Now coffee enters the scene, thank God:

"Coffee, like wine, was an aid to union with the divine. Long before the time of the Sufis, coffee beans, the fruit of a bush native to the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia, had been chewed like a nut or mixed with animal fat to make a portable, satisfying, and stimulating food for warriors." If you haven't seen the way coffee grows, the bean is just the seed, and of course has a softer fruit surrounding it (which is also lightly caffeinated, and is sometimes used now in some coffee-growing regions to make a vaguely hibiscus-like drink). "Coffee plants were naturalized in Yemen perhaps as early as the sixth century BCE when the Abyssinians invaded Arabia. Later, a new way of preparing coffee by toasting the beans, grinding them, and brewing them with hot water was developed, perhaps in Iran. The Arabic word for coffee, qahwah, probably derives from a word meaning to have little appetite and hence to be able to do without. It had been first applied to wine and later to coffee (which suppressed the desire to sleep). Sufi pilgrims, traders, students, and travelers consumed coffee to keep awake during ceremonies and induce a sense of euphoria, spreading its use throughout the Islamic world between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries."

Islam introduced coffee to the West, as with so many things, and that's not all! They also introduced stuff to have with coffee.

"Sugar cookery was introduced from Islam in the twelfth century by a physician known as Pseudo-Messue. The English words syrup, sherbet, and candy all have Arabic roots. Medicinal electuaries, pastes of spices and drugs, and comfits, sugar-coated spices, were the distant forerunners of candy. Sugared spices did not break the fast, Thomas Aquinas said, because 'although they are nutritious themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion.' It was an important decision, both because it gave medical respectability to sugar and because it foreshadowed later arguments about chocolate."

Arab fruit pastes became Portuguese quince marmalada, later inspiring citrus marmalades that are more familiar to Americans, and the sweet fried doughs used to celebrate the end of Ramadan inspired similar fried doughs in Catholic traditions, eaten before the Lenten fast: doughnuts, beignets, etc. (The Brits have their pancakes.)

Along with all this came distillation and better booze. Not too shabby.

"In the early fourteenth century, cookbook manuscripts began appearing across Europe.... Rarely were these cookbooks step-by-step manuals, being, rather, testimonials to a ruler's fine cuisine or aide-memoires to professional cooks. With the invention of printing, the number increased again."

Medieval history is not at all my area of expertise, but this broadly fits my understanding of the ... history of professionalization, sort of, the history of procedural rigor, if you will.

The dissemination of cookbooks further contributed to the Westernization of Islamic dishes in Europe, in much the same way that nineteenth and twentieth century cookbooks Americanized immigrant and foreign cuisines:

"Al-sikbaj (meat cooked in a mixture of sweetener and vinegar) was transformed into fried or poached fish (or chicken, rabbit, or pork) in an acid marinade of vinegar or orange (escabeche), perhaps the origin of aspic." Al-sikbaj was a characteristic dish of the Moors who conquered Spain, but has since died out in the Muslim world. "Ruperto de Nola's Libre del coch included thin noodles, bitter oranges, fried fish, escabeche, almond sauces, and almond confections. Martinez Motino's Arte de cocina contained several recipes for meatballs and capirotada, and one for couscous. It also had one for Moorish hen, roast chicken cut into pieces, simmered with bacon, onion, broth, wine, and spices -- which were not named, but probably included pepper, cinnamon, and cloves -- and then enlivened with a final dash of vinegar. The bacon and wine were typically Christian, but the sour-spicy sauce justifies the name."

So here's the other thing about sugar: it used to be in fucking everything. The line between "sweet" and "savory" isn't just a recent thing, it's the defining characteristic of the modern palate. Candies and confectionery used to include not just candied oranges and cherries, but carrots and turnips. Meat dishes in high cuisines were regularly served in sweet sauces -- no, not like at that Chinese place, no not like barbecue sauce, like really noticeably sweet, not tangy.

Then that changed.

If you have to pick a point where things start to change, it's 1651, when Pierre Francois La Varenne published La Cuisinier Francois, which was widely translated, and which inspired numerous imitators. The middle of the seventeenth century saw a significant shift in Western tastes characterized by two changes: "the disappearance of spices and sugar from savory dishes [notice how rarely we use 'baking' spices like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, etc., in savory dishes, whereas they are still common in Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian cuisines] and the appearance of new fat-based sauces, many thickened with flour."

The traditional Catholic cuisine was displaced piecemeal across Europe. In England, "the aristocracy dined on the new French cuisine. The gentry, by contrast, rejected this in favor of a middling bread-and-beef cuisine optimistically described as the national cuisine." Across most of western Europe, sweet and sour were segregated to different dishes and usually different courses, while beef and bread became higher profile, as did dairy, and sauces using fat and flour. French cuisine both informed other European cuisines while at the same time absorbing and reinterpreting elements of them, a process that continued for the next couple centuries.

One of the major innovations of the time period was "middling cuisines," a prerequisite to modern cuisine: "Middling in the sense of bridging high and low cuisine, rich in fats, sugar, and exotic foodstuffs, featuring sauces and sweets, and eaten with specialized utensils in dedicated dining areas, middling cuisine became available to an increasing proportion of the population in the following centuries. Changes in political and nutritional theory underwrote this closing of the gap between high and humble cuisines. As more nations followed the Dutch and British in locating the source of rulers' legitimacy not in hereditary or divine rights but in some form of consent or expression of the will of the people, it became increasingly difficult to deny to all citizens the right to eat the same kind of food. In the West, the appearance of middling cuisines ran in close parallel with the extension of the vote. Reinforcing this, nutritional theory abandoned the idea that cuisine determined and reflected rank in society in favor of a single cuisine appropriate for every class of people.

"The growth of middling cuisines is what nutritionists call the 'nutrition transition,' the sequential global shift from diets composed largely of grains to diets high in sugar, oils, and meat ... the nutrition transition increases food security [but] brings in its wake many associated health problems, including increased incidence of strokes, heart attacks, obesity, and diabetes, and with them increased costs for society." (Of course, poverty and malnutrition have also decreased, so there's that.)

These middling cuisines began before the Industrial Revolution, but that was a huge driver in really bringing all these trends together and forming what we would recognize as modern cuisine. The advances of the Industrial Revolution brought about more efficient and cheaper forms of food preservation, refrigeration and rapid transportation of fresh food, extraordinary advances in agriculture (among them new fertilizers and pesticides), and so on, transforming the quality, quantity, and price of food more dramatically than any development had since the mastery of grain cookery thousands of years earlier. Those advances in transportation also made more feasible the waves of immigration that repopulated the United States after Native American tribes were decimated, and the arrival of many, many different immigrant groups, all with their own cuisines -- but not always with access to ingredients from home, and sometimes finding it easier to adapt what was available -- contributed to what is erroneously called the "melting pot," an American cuisine that was and I think remains in flux. Americans were also the first to begin using ice in their drinks -- and in a million other ways -- to such a great extent, and pioneered the commercial ice business.

The influence of French cuisine on modern cooking remained strong, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous dishes in non-French cuisines were created or altered with distinctive French touches -- adding butter instead of oil, reducing the spices and herbs in Greek dishes, adding dressing cold cooked vegetables or meats with mayonnaise or raw vegetables with vinaigrette. Bechamel -- originally Italian! but popularized by La Varenne -- showed up everywhere, with Russians using it as a piroshki filling with mushrooms or to thicken soup, Mexican chefs using it to dress fish, Indian chefs using it to dress eggplant and pumpkin. Beef Stroganov, unsurprisingly, is one of the most famous Russian dishes attempting to emulate French cooking, while bechamel was repopularized in northern Italy and found its way into lasagna.

A middling cuisine means, by extension, that pretty much everyone eats pretty much the same thing, at least in the broad strokes. Inevitably that means the specifics invite criticism. "Religious groups, conservatives, socialists, and feminists attacked modern middling cuisines. Some wanted the egalitarianism of modern culinary philosophy but rejected other aspects. For example, many reformers turned their backs on meat, white bread, and alcohol, developing alternative physiologies and nutritional theories to explain why vegetarianism [a term coined in the 1840s] or whole grains were superior. Others attacked domesticity, liberalism, and free trade, proposing alternative ways of organizing modern cooking, commerce, and farming. Yet others hoped it might be possible to return to a [purely] imagined egalitarian past, invoking agrarian and romantic traditions to criticize modern, industrialized cuisines."

One key to remember with the historical development of these things, and when encountering new such things in the wild, is, you know, the rejection tends to come first, with the rationale developed shortly thereafter. By the time you hear about it, that may not be clear, because once the rationale is developed, it's all "so I was doing research on Youtube and I discovered, holy fuck, bananas cause butt cancer," but really it's just that this one guy didn't fucking like bananas, or the idea of bananas, or he really liked the idea of conspicuously avoiding consumption of something, and later he came up with the butt cancer thing.

Okay! That brings us close enough to the present day to wrap up there. One more book down.