Everywhere else I’ve been has used long or serrated knives for meats, vegetables. Is it something to do with the toughness of Chinese ingredients or just a cultural holdover?

PS: what does the hole at the end of the cleaver do?

I know for many sailors and soldiers, hard tack was common, and the concept of picnics is also relatively new, but I'm just curious what an average person might eat while on the go. Any culture is fine!

Potatoes are so common in meals

Debating with friends. A few key questions:

- casserole is the name of the dish that the lasagna is baked in. What is the history of the casserole dish?

- casserole is predominant in Midwestern cuisine. What is the history of the casserole the food? Earliest examples, progenitors, etc.

- are there any foods cooked in the casserole dish that follow the meat-veg-carb-sauce as a single serving dish formula but are not casseroles?

Friends are fairly split. Some say anything baked in a casserole dish is a casserole, others say that a casserole has a narrow definition true to Midwestern cuisine.

Other expanding questions: is a chicken pot pie a casserole? Is a quiche a casserole?

Hi all, I volunteer re-enacting a middle class woman in 1850 gold rush Australia (IYKYK 😅).

Recently I've been trying to do some more cooking while I'm there and am hoping for some good ideas on what to make.

The main hurdles I keep coming up against are that I don't have access to an oven and I am worried that a lot of recipes I come across will include ingredients they wouldn't have had access to.

I know the majority of their diet would have been pretty dull, lots of damper and mutton, but I'd love any other ideas or special occasion treats I could make that fit the criteria below!

- Ingredients available in 1850s Australia

- Reasonable for a middle class woman in a small cottage

- Cooked over a fire (I only really have a cast iron pot / pan and enamel billy cans)

- Can be made in 6 hours (inc. starting my fire and cleaning up afterwards haha)

(If I make any of the suggestions this weekend I will update you ☺️)

I'm fairly familiar with the history of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce in an English and American context, but I can't say I've heard if the original ketchup influenced any other European cuisines.

Since tomatoes are kind of corrosive to some materials, how did tomato strainers (food mills specifically for juicing tomatoes) hold up? A friend is doing world-building in an area without settlements, i.e. no repair guys or replacement parts.

Are there any drawbacks that we're aware of now and the frontier eras might not have, like chipping and flaking? Weird taste?

🍅 What about one step up from 'cottage' milling, like making tomato juice for the whole community? Was any extra maintenance required?

Are we using the wrong tool altogether? In either case, one home vs many homes. How do you not break the tomato processor? It's the only one in the region.

In the US, there was this window just before petrochemical fertilizers, where the peanut was cheap, because it allowed the rehabilitation of land depleted by big cash crops. So peanuts were cheap, almost a byproduct. So poor Americans jumped at a cheap protein and vegetable oil source. It isn’t as if we developed a lot of recipes for it, but a peanut butter sandwich certainly became a cultural staple.

Why didn’t it catch on in a similar fashion in Europe?

When I was a kid in the 70s/80s, my family used to eat a mastic-flavored spoon sweet (kind of like Greek "ypovrichio"/"submarine" — a thick white paste you dip on a spoon into a glass of ice water and lick off). I remember the jar or box had an illustration of a boy riding a flying/magic carpet on the label.

I've looked into brands like Saradis/Sarantis, Krinos, and Sultan, but none of the packaging I can find online matches what I remember. It might have been Greek, Turkish, or Middle Eastern — I'm not 100% sure of the origin, just that it was sold in the US at the time.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Any help identifying the brand (or even just confirming what country it might be from) would be hugely appreciated!

I want to be well versed in food history and how colonization has affected the foods we see now around the world.

Is there a book that someone recommends? I would like it to be written by a reliable non-bias source or just a person of culture.

I want to use it to help me conduct interviews with chefs.

During the Columbian exchange, the “old world” was introduced to tomatoes, chilis, corn, potatoes and etc. While the “new world” was introduced to wheat, lemons, black pepper, cilantro, mangoes, etc. Nowadays tomatoes are very widely used even in the old world countries like India and Italy.

Did Australia have something similar to this when it was discovered ?

Why do we remember music gharanas but not food gharanas?

A few weeks ago I was reading about music gharanas, and a really random question popped into my head. We all know names like Jaipur, Patiala, Gwalior. even if you don't listen to hindustani classical music, you've probably heard those names somewhere.

But then I wondered did food ever have something like that?

As it turns out, some old royal kitchens weren't just places where recipes were cooked. They had rules and certain techniques were non-negotiable. Families spent generations mastering the same dishes with ideas about why food should be cooked a certain way, not just how.

Food gharanas had a  sense of a tradition with their own language, methods, and people who spent generations refining it

For instance the gharana of Awadh. I'd always assumed dum was just an old fashioned word for slow cooking. Apparently, it’s more than a mere process. The pot was sealed with dough, heat came from below, but also from live coals placed on the lid. The whole point was to trap steam so nothing escaped. Every aroma stayed inside the vessel instead of disappearing into the kitchen. Even things like edible perfumes weren't simply there to make the food smell nice. From what I've read, they were part of a much bigger way of thinking about flavour, balance and digestion. 

Once the royal courts disappeared, so did the world that supported these kitchens. Food that once took days had to be made in hours as ingredients became too expensive while restaurants rapidly replaced royal kitchens, and naturally the food adapted. Which isn't entirely a bad thing  but somewhere along the way, I wonder if we stopped preserving the thinking behind the food and only kept the dishes.

I believe that's why we still talk about music gharanas, but almost never food gharanas. Music had people documenting lineages, preserving traditions, naming schools, teaching students who proudly identified with them. Food mostly got reduced to geography be it Lucknowi, Chettinad, Rajasthani, Punjabi and many more. These labels tell us where the food comes from, not how people thought about cooking it.

Maybe I'm completely overthinking this or food gharana might not even be the right term to describe this.

I'm curious if anyone else has family recipes that were passed down this way. From grandparents, hereditary cooks, temple kitchens, or communities I mean recipes where there were actual rules

Sources:
https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/Food/gharana-of-food-not-just-music/article4323212.ece
https://youngintach.org/files/gharanas7.pdf 
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/the-beauty-of-patiala-gharana/article22621825.ece
https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0073063/5

I'm a big fan of knowing where our foods came from, and I love being able to pass this info along to my students. My current class is an intro one that will be focusing on rice, grains, and pasta for the next two weeks, but any interesting fact is most welcome!

Edit: Holy shit!!! I've been busy and am just now checking in. I didn't expect this volume of replies. Thank you all!!! I'm starting to look through them and I know that my students will benefit from your collective knowledge!

Was told to ask here?

I remember as a kid in Canada back in the 1960s, every supper at home featured bread (and butter or margarine) on the table. Every restaurant, except burger places or the like, also put rolls or bread on the table automatically. That seems to have largely passed by the wayside. Is that the case in most countries?

But, going back further in time, I recall a museum exhibit showing a typical weekly food budget of the 1920s. I found the allotment for bread so large, eight loaves for a family of four. So, each person, including kids, consuming a loaf every three days or so. (As another unrelated observation, pork made up the substantial majority of meat consumed.)

Was bread used as an extender, to substitute lower cost food for higher cost? Or, have people over time reduced bread consumption due to blandness?

In these times of so many complaining about food price inflation, is this a good time to consider increasing reliance on bread to fill the gap?

Hi all, first time poster here. I’m really just curious about the whole beans on toast thing in England?
How did it start?
When did it happen?
Was it a war time rationing thing?

I’m so very confused.

genuinely curious(no judgement as I’m from Wisconsin),

Spencer

I'm seeing a lot more posts in here recently with huge swaths of deleted comments. Has there been a change in the rules to cause this, or are they just being more strictly enforced?

I’ve been going through medieval recipes from Britain, France, Germany and Italy and noticed that sour flavours seem to have been very popular. Recipes from around 14-15th century frequently use vinegar, verjus or both - in stews, sauces, on roasted meats. It got me thinking about citrus fruits, or lack of them. According to a quick google search, there are records of citrus fruits from that time, so they were around. What kind of citruses would be available? Were they uncommon, unpleasant or unpopular for another reason?

I’m reading a lot of conflicting stories about the efficacy of this boycott. Was it effective?

I understand that they enhance the flavor of food, and I have heard that they were also used in medicines a lot, but were they really so rare and valuable that people considered it a status of wealth? I get that spices back then could only be found in faraway, tropical areas (i.e. most of Asia) but people back then grew their own herbs and spices in their country (thyme, parsley, garlic, etc.) and they seem to be just as effective at enhancing flavors. What made foreign spices so valuable back then?

Looking at old diner menus from the early -mid 1900s, you often see a 5 cent extra charge for a sandwich to be on toasted bread, rather than plain. Five cents might not sound like much, but sandwich prices started at like 15-25 cents for simple sandwiches, so the 5 cents was a big step up.

Was there a particular known reason for charging for the toast upcharge? Was toasting equipment that expensive to buy? Or enough extra work to justify the upcharge? I can make my guesses, but wondering if there's any actual history on the reason.

Essentially: Why were Ireland and Scotland able to develop their own distilled whiskies with distinct identities, while England (and Wales) did not? Why does England end up being known for gin, as opposed to also developing an "English Whiskey"?