anyway.
A Penny for Your Thoughts
1-11-05
The Food Timeline! Gacked from MetaFilter.
A Mesopotamian recipe for goat stew (pdf) with an unknown ingredient, samidu! Antique Roman recipes - friend, pear souffle! Coriander and pine nuts salad! The cuisine of Christopher Columbus! The difference between an epicure and a glutton in 1821, plus tomato catsup!
I'm in non-gaming-geek heaven.
On 1-11-05, Meguey wrote:
Oh how very very COOL! And I'm not even as excited by this as you are. (Now, if only I could find a similar time-line about dyes used for cloth. And for patterns/methods used for printing on cloth. And types of cloth. And costume. Hm.)
On 1-11-05, Meguey wrote:
And everything in Roman cookery seems to end with "sprinkle with pepper" Shows how valuable the spice was.
On 1-11-05, Ben Lehman wrote:
That is, like, twenty different sources of awesome.
yrs--
--Ben
On 1-12-05, kreg wrote:
mmmm...seems crazy that a spice can become "lost", but i guess there are whole civilizations that have done that same thing, so...what's a little missing spice in the grand scheme of things, eh?
Babylonian Pigeon Stew:
"Split one pigeon in half. Boil water, into which put fat, salt, malt, onions, samidu [unknown spice], leeks and garlic. Soften spices in milk before adding them to the water. Simmer with the pigeon and a piece of red meat. Serve and carve on a platter."
(from the Yale collection: http://www.yale.edu/opa/v30.n7/story9.html)
On 1-12-05, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
Oooo! A quest for Samidu! There's a pirate story!
On 1-12-05, Meguey wrote:
The interesting thing is, is the spice *missing* or is it in disquise? In fabric, there are terms that have fallen out of use, and terms where the meaning has changed, even though the product is still there. Of course, there are the culinary equivalents of Flanders linen, which could be spun and woven so fine you could read through it, and was bombed out of existence.
On 1-12-05, kreg wrote:
Meguey,
you're probably right...one of the links i found said something about it possibly being in the onion family:
http://www.zindamagazine.com/html/archives/1998/may18_1998.htm
(scroll down to "Kid Stew")
so, it may very well be a type of wild onion that has since been renamed as you suggest with fabric.
-k
On 1-12-05, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
Sure, that was my first thought. There are all sorts of things like that in Torah, too. There's the 'ephah' of grain (which seems to be a lot), a shekel is money, but who knows how much? and all sorts of stuff.
It shows you just how reliant we are on words to make meaning.
On 1-13-05, Meguey wrote:
And how much plugindisp we glork from context.