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Elissimpark posted:Lol, peas don't go with cream. and salami doesn't go with jam, but my mom doesn't care luckily she can't understand English, or posts about mixing peas and cream would give her Ideas
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Jul 2, 2023 22:52
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Koramei posted:Foods are one of those things that people think of as deeply entwined with the roots of their tradition since time immemorial, but when you dig into it traditional recipes have near always (there are exceptions) undergone such staggering changes even within the past couple of centuries (and definitely post-Columbian exchange) that it's often a stretch to keep thinking of it as one thing. 2000 years is a long-rear end time and most cultural roots are actually relatively shallow. But it tends to be an emotionally charged subject so it's not normally challenged. A fascinating example is the traditional Icelandic-Canadian dessert, Vienna Cake (vinarterta). Many Icelanders moved to Canada in 1875 after the volcanic eruption of Askja. At the time, Vienna Cake had just become trendy in Iceland, and it became a beloved tradition among Icelandic-Canadians while its popularity faded in Iceland and Austria.
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Jul 4, 2023 03:06
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Pizza is of course an exception. The Roman's were making pizza with Flatbread, cheese, and tomato based sauce already in the early republic. (Due to the Bolivian exchange)
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Jul 4, 2023 16:10
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Arglebargle III posted:Pizza is of course an exception. The Roman's were making pizza with Flatbread, cheese, and tomato based sauce already in the early republic. (Due to the Bolivian exchange) well yeah, Atlantis traded with the entire world, after all
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Jul 4, 2023 19:49
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Tulip posted:At this point I just want people to provide some evidence, any evidence at all other than goon love of junk food. Cultural universals are rare and very difficult to demonstrate and very potent when found. I need to do a deep dive into the literature sometime, but IIRC lactase persistence emerged as a heritable trait around 10K years ago, and is one of the most selected-for traits to have emerged over that period of time. Use of fermented milk products predated that, ie there was a long period of time during which lactose intolerant people were eating cheese.
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Jul 4, 2023 23:10
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Libluini posted:and salami doesn't go with jam, but my mom doesn't care I might have to give that a go. (the cream and peas was just a joke about carbonara. As if any one was deranged enough to make carbonara with cream.)
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Jul 4, 2023 23:59
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I need to do a deep dive into the literature sometime, but IIRC lactase persistence emerged as a heritable trait around 10K years ago, and is one of the most selected-for traits to have emerged over that period of time. Use of fermented milk products predated that, ie there was a long period of time during which lactose intolerant people were eating cheese. Let me put it another way: I like to cook. I like to learn recipes from a lot of different cuisines. Very few of those cuisines use melted cheese. Chinese (and yes I know there are several, I am thinking of Shanghainese, Hunan, Sichuan and Xi'an since those are the ones I've got more familiarity with), Japanese, Korean, Philippine, and Indonesian cuisines rarely if ever use any dairy at all. Of the cuisines that I'm more familiar with that do use dairy, such as Indian, Ethiopian, and Yunnan, melted cheese is very rare. In the case of Indian for example, yogurt isn't cheese and people don't really melt paneer. In Ethiopian, baduu isn't cheese and ayeb isn't melted. These are countries that now feature melted cheese, but to say that's evidence of a premodern cultural universal practice is extremely dubious, since that's the logic that leads to people thinking that tobacco was an old world plant. Like tobacco, the commonality of melted cheese dishes across the globe can pretty readily be traced to the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. If we weight for population, then dairy in general isn't super popular and melted cheese in specific isn't popular at all. I don't feel like this should be surprising: cows are very expensive in all but the most specific of situations (which tend to have very low population densities ANYWAY, and those places will tend more toward sheep though yes those do make dairy), and in highly dense rice-growing region cows are even more expensive because they use a ton of land and that land could almost certainly be better put to use growing more rice (which doesn't benefit as much from using cows for fertilizer and plowing like wheat growing regions). The simple fact of that matter is that, even if people can eat dairy, it wasn't until recently that they chose to eat dairy the way we currently do.
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Jul 5, 2023 07:14
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Hunan melt the cheese, this is an emperor.
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Jul 5, 2023 09:58
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Tulip posted:Let me put it another way: I like to cook. I like to learn recipes from a lot of different cuisines. Very few of those cuisines use melted cheese. Chinese (and yes I know there are several, I am thinking of Shanghainese, Hunan, Sichuan and Xi'an since those are the ones I've got more familiarity with), Japanese, Korean, Philippine, and Indonesian cuisines rarely if ever use any dairy at all. Of the cuisines that I'm more familiar with that do use dairy, such as Indian, Ethiopian, and Yunnan, melted cheese is very rare. In the case of Indian for example, yogurt isn't cheese and people don't really melt paneer. In Ethiopian, baduu isn't cheese and ayeb isn't melted. There are two things here: 1) Societies actually eating cheese 2) Societies eating melted cheese For 1, there is strong evidence that, everywhere that could keep cows ate cheese. This even predates lactase persistence, but lactase persistence followed soon after, because it conveyed an enormous selective advantage, because people loving loved cheese. (And it could carry them through hard times.) quote:The frequency of lactase persistence is high in northern European populations (>90% in Swedes and Danes), decreases in frequency across southern Europe and the Middle East (~50% in Spanish, French and pastoralist Arab populations) and is low in non-pastoralist Asian and African populations (~1% in Chinese, ~5%-20% in West African agriculturalists)1-3. Notably, lactase persistence is common in pastoralist populations from Africa (~90% in Tutsi, ~50% in Fulani)1,3. For 2, we don't have a ton of evidence to go on, because of the general lack of cookbooks, but Cato the Elder's recipe for placenta is basically a sweet pie stuffed with cheese, so the Ancient Romans for sure melted cheese. I guess there may also be 3) "some goon asserting that cheese is universal", which is obviously not true in the historical or archaeological record, but may kinda be today. See also how much pastoralist societies loving loved cheese.
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Jul 6, 2023 06:24
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Lead out in cuffs posted:There are two things here: here's 3) Mad Hamish posted:I would assume the Romans loved melty cheese just like everyone else. What maniac doesn't like melty cheese? Anyway my whole thing here is that there are VERY few cultural universals. And the ones we do find tend to be vague. Marriage and funerals are cultural universals, but no specific marital or funerary practice is, to my knowledge, universal. Not all societies expect monogamy in marriage. Not all societies wear black for mourning. Yes all societies cook. No there is no single recipe that is universal to all societies. "Porridge" is probably the closest I can imagine, since you can make it with rice or wheat or oats or millet or corn and that covers a pretty wide swath of all staple crops, but I don't even think that's enough. I don't really think you can make a porridge with potatoes or manioc or breadfruit or taro, and on top of that there are societies that don't have any staple crop at all. Finding cultural universals is difficult and when you find them they can be incredibly powerful. But you also have to be aware of false universals. As mentioned, smoking cigarettes is incredibly culturally common. But its common as a result of the history colonialism, which is extremely different from as a result of prehistoric or even possibly instinctual sources. As you say, cheese is made by AFAIK every single society that raises cows (I'd even expand that - some pastoralists eschew cows entirely but still eat lots of dairy, because sheep are better than cows in a lot of economic situations). But not every society has significant or sometimes any cow population. Rice growing regions tend to have very few cows, cows never really made it to oceania, and there is of course that whole 'new world' phenomena people are going on about. To get back to nitpicky bullshit, I will question your Cato argument - heating a cheese doesn't necessarily melt it. Some cheeses just don't have the properties to really "melt" in any meaningful way. Again, paneer doesn't really melt, it just kind of falls apart. Like if Cato says "until the cheese is melted" that'd be one thing, or if we have a good sense that the roman cheese in question was more like a mozzarella or other well-melting cheese that's another, but I'd like to know rather than just assume that it behaved in a way that conforms to my present biases.
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Jul 6, 2023 08:17
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Tulip posted:Let me put it another way: I like to cook. I like to learn recipes from a lot of different cuisines. Very few of those cuisines use melted cheese. Chinese (and yes I know there are several, I am thinking of Shanghainese, Hunan, Sichuan and Xi'an since those are the ones I've got more familiarity with), Japanese, Korean, Philippine, and Indonesian cuisines rarely if ever use any dairy at all. I'm certainly not saying you're wrong over time, but by your own assertion food culture changes over time, so that cuisines now DON'T use cheese, doesn't mean they didn't. Do you have any evidence that these cuisines which don't use cheese now, didn't in the past?
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Jul 6, 2023 08:26
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I do: cheese is delicious.
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Jul 6, 2023 11:33
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I will point out that I said that everyone loves melty cheese, not that every society in antiquity was set up for it in the past. Absolutely many cultures were not agrarian in a fashion that leads to lots of cheese-making or has a cooking style that leads to the melting of that non-existent cheese, but my point was more along the lines of asking who would encounter it and then say "no, we don't want this"? You're reading a lot more into that post than was intended. Like, ok, in Asia there wasn't a lot of cheesemaking, but they definitely go for pizza now. Admittedly the things they do it it probably make food purists weep, but hell, they seem to be having fun with it and I say let them.
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Jul 6, 2023 12:50
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Mad Hamish posted:I will point out that I said that everyone loves melty cheese, not that every society in antiquity was set up for it in the past. Absolutely many cultures were not agrarian in a fashion that leads to lots of cheese-making or has a cooking style that leads to the melting of that non-existent cheese, but my point was more along the lines of asking who would encounter it and then say "no, we don't want this"? You're reading a lot more into that post than was intended. I suspect the pushback is more broadly because stuff like this is part and parcel with how people like to project their own lives/culture/history/experience on other cultures, both modern and ancient. The whole thing can just be summarized as the "oh they were just like us! The human experience is universal!" reaction that people love to have when they spot something they recognize in an ancient context. The classic example being dick graffiti in ancient Rome. I mean, yeah, maybe the reasons for scratching a big fat dong on that wall were the same 'lol dicks' reason for the one in the men's room at the bar. But there are tons of other explanations too that are specific to the cultural practices and worldview of the person who did it, and which may be unknowable to us. It might be "lol dicks" and it might be - spitballing some random poo poo - a spiritual ward, a good luck charm, an insult, or a way to mark a street gang's territory. The "hah, the ancients were ~just like us~" stuff is a double edged sword, setting aside entirely whether or not it's even correct. On the one hand, yeah, that poo poo draws people in to getting interested about history. That's great. A slickly produced To take this all back to cheese, the whole reason we're having this conversation in the first place is because someone found a picture of some kind of flat bread dish with toppings and every clickbait generator on the internet leapt straight to "archeologists discover ANCIENT ROMAN PIZZA lol they were ~just like us~." Which is kind of unlikely for all the reasons people have already chewed over in here, but ultimately telling people the Romans made pizza is not only likely inaccurate, it's also likely more boring than the reality of whatever that dish was, because if we ever do find out exactly what was going on in that picture it probably tells us a lot about day to day Roman life that we don't know now.
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Jul 6, 2023 14:39
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Eventually the Atlanteans will come back from space, see the evidence for pizza-eating in North America, and assume that obviously those North Americans were an offshoot colony of the Romans and Italians. They must be, just look at how all these pillars look the same, and also the flatness of their flatbreads!
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Jul 6, 2023 14:50
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i feel like to a less than academic standard, its safe to say any place that had cheese that could melt, probably melted it.
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Jul 6, 2023 14:58
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Mad Hamish posted:Eventually the Atlanteans will come back from space, see the evidence for pizza-eating in North America, and assume that obviously those North Americans were an offshoot colony of the Romans and Italians. They must be, just look at how all these pillars look the same, and also the flatness of their flatbreads!
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Jul 6, 2023 15:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:I suspect the pushback is more broadly because stuff like this is part and parcel with how people like to project their own lives/culture/history/experience on other cultures, both modern and ancient. The whole thing can just be summarized as the "oh they were just like us! The human experience is universal!" reaction that people love to have when they spot something they recognize in an ancient context. The classic example being dick graffiti in ancient Rome. I mean, yeah, maybe the reasons for scratching a big fat dong on that wall were the same 'lol dicks' reason for the one in the men's room at the bar. But there are tons of other explanations too that are specific to the cultural practices and worldview of the person who did it, and which may be unknowable to us. It might be "lol dicks" and it might be - spitballing some random poo poo - a spiritual ward, a good luck charm, an insult, or a way to mark a street gang's territory. Do you think any ancient Romans ever pulled the big sausage pizza routine?
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Jul 6, 2023 15:44
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Big sausages were considered garish in those times.
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Jul 6, 2023 15:54
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If you have cheese, there's not really that many ways you can prepare it, and cooking with fire is already one of those human civilization universals.Mad Hamish posted:Eventually the Atlanteans will come back from space, see the evidence for pizza-eating in North America, and assume that obviously those North Americans were an offshoot colony of the Romans and Italians. They must be, just look at how all these pillars look the same, and also the flatness of their flatbreads! Isn't it though?
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Jul 6, 2023 16:05
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Btw modern pizza from Pompeii area does not use bovine cheese
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Jul 6, 2023 16:28
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Romans were clearly too stupid and primitive to melt cheese over bread.
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Jul 6, 2023 16:36
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WoodrowSkillson posted:i feel like to a less than academic standard, its safe to say any place that had cheese that could melt, probably melted it. One of the few things that has been considered a perfectly just casus belli for 50,000 years is if your neighbors don't melt their cheese. People think Jenghiz destroyed Kwharezm because of that stuff with the ambassadors, no sir. He found out they were making that one pizza where you put the cold cheese on top of the hot pizza and let it kinda droop a little before you eat it. Treated it like they were trying to raise R'lyeh and set Cthulhu free on Earth. "They do what? Oh no none of that poo poo, call up the army, we march at dawn to kill them all in the name of the Great Blue Sky and melted cheese!" -Jenghiz Khan
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Jul 6, 2023 16:39
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Tired: Aliens built the pyramids Wired: Aliens taught humans about melting cheese and putting it on things
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Jul 6, 2023 16:51
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People today may look with distaste on the Roman practice of deifying emperors, and yet there is a painting at the crown of the dome of the US Capitol Building depicting the apotheosis of George Washington. Gods, those Atlanteans will be so confused.
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Jul 6, 2023 17:05
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Apparently Chinggis Khan is more of a title than a personal name. Unsure which American khans deserve it.
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Jul 6, 2023 17:08
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JonathonSpectre posted:One of the few things that has been considered a perfectly just casus belli for 50,000 years is if your neighbors don't melt their cheese. 
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Jul 6, 2023 17:16
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I forget if I asked this but did George Washington just straight up base his life on cincinnatus
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Jul 6, 2023 20:56
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Buschmaki posted:I forget if I asked this but did George Washington just straight up base his life on cincinnatus The similarities were not at all lost on anyone at the time, but I don’t think it was intentional and it seems like Washington really just liked being retired.
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Jul 6, 2023 21:04
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Buschmaki posted:I forget if I asked this but did George Washington just straight up base his life on cincinnatus No but kind of. He was definitely aware of the comparison (it would have been hard not to be since it was being made from basically the minute he put down his guns), and was smart enough to let a reputation for legendary virtue get milked for everything it was worth. And on top of the standard issue revolution era obsession with the classics, he was the founding president of the Society of the Cincinnati (hereditary social club for ex-continental officers which turned out mostly irrelevant except for the obvious thing, but at the time ironically pissed off other revolutionaries like Franklin and Jefferson because it sounded a lot like the seed of a military aristocracy which they weren’t in)
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Jul 6, 2023 21:15
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Crab Dad posted:Do you think any ancient Romans ever pulled the big sausage pizza routine? And if so, did they have the intellectual honesty to use a hot, fresh pizza, rather than a safe, cold wax simulacrum?
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Jul 6, 2023 22:56
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skasion posted:No but kind of. He was definitely aware of the comparison (it would have been hard not to be since it was being made from basically the minute he put down his guns), and was smart enough to let a reputation for legendary virtue get milked for everything it was worth. He also prevented the Newburgh military coup by talking them down, so he wasn't exactly coasting on it
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Jul 6, 2023 23:15
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Carillon posted:I'm certainly not saying you're wrong over time, but by your own assertion food culture changes over time, so that cuisines now DON'T use cheese, doesn't mean they didn't. Do you have any evidence that these cuisines which don't use cheese now, didn't in the past? To a certain extent this gets confusing because I'm not sure if "ancient Roman cuisine" and "contemporary Italian cuisine" should quite be considered continuous. Which I guess would be part of my answer: to me its more intuitive to think of cuisines as having like, 100-200 year lifespans, after which point you have to do some checks on "is this the same cuisine at all, or is it just in the same geographic area." Similar to how if there's a guy named Julius Julius Julius in Rome in 200BCE and a guy named Julius Julius Julius in Rome in 200CE, its not safe to assume that its literally the same guy. Which to get to the point, if for example we know that cows and sheep basically didn't exist in an area for a few hundred years, I feel pretty comfortable saying that the cuisine of that area and time just didn't really use dairy. Which lets us look at most of China between 200CE and more or less now and go "yee-up, several whole food traditions here didn't bother with cheese," or even more easily America before 1400CE and Polynesia for...I don't know polynesian history well enough to try and put a number on this I just know that cows and sheep were definitely not part of their premodern food system. Anyway you wanted evidence. We have for real archaeologically preserved food from China. At the Lajia site we found 4000 year old noodles. Like they're just there. I wouldn't eat them now but I'm sure they were good at some point:  We have found cheese in China, the oldest cheese we've found in fact. But its in Xinjiang from the 1600s BCE. Later food archaeological findings in more eastern and southern China, I simply have never heard of any of those having cheese of any sort up until y'know like, Pizza Hut. It'd be difficult to exhaustively prove that it NEVER happened, but I think if we find noodles and dumplings and millet porridges and kabobs and tofu dishes and such over and over and over in dig sites and written records but no cheese, its easier to assume cheese wasn't there than that there was a secret conspiracy to cover up a massive cheese importing operation that everybody loved but somehow never wrote about. Mad Hamish posted:I will point out that I said that everyone loves melty cheese, not that every society in antiquity was set up for it in the past. Absolutely many cultures were not agrarian in a fashion that leads to lots of cheese-making or has a cooking style that leads to the melting of that non-existent cheese, but my point was more along the lines of asking who would encounter it and then say "no, we don't want this"? You're reading a lot more into that post than was intended. Yeah I didn't quote you before cuz i didn't want to be a dick coming down on you super hard. You made a lil bit of a shitposty thing and I made a responding shitposty thing. "Who doesn't love x", "Well these big groups that are fairly different." Then I feel like I got a lot of pushback for a claim that, at least to my eyes, was pretty obvious and didn't require a lot of evidence in the first place. Which felt pretty frustrating!
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Jul 6, 2023 23:58
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The Chinese were never big on cheese because they considered it food for stinky steppe nomads. Even when China was ruled by nomad dynasties, I don't think cheese would have been something that was widely consumed. I assume the rest of east Asia followed suit simply because China had an outsized influence on that part of the world for centuries
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Jul 7, 2023 04:55
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Cheese is highly nutritious food and efficient form of food preservation, tenant farmers aren't going to stick their noses up at the idea. The actual reason why its rare in let's say, subtropical East Asia, is just land usage. If you don't reserve a lot of land for pasturing cattle or sheep or goats, then you're not getting much milk, and then you're definitely not making much cheese.
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Jul 7, 2023 06:42
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This is not really ancient history but Sweden has a nice example of how dairy farming is affected by population density and land use. Farming in Sweden have always included a lot of domesticated animals due to the climate and relative abundance of marginal land vs arable land. However, when the black death/bubonic plague hit Sweden there was, like for most of western Europe, a very drastic population decline. This meant that labour was in very short supply in Sweden and much of the previously worked land became fallow because villages consolidated or simply disappeared. This led to a sharp increase in the raising of dairy cattle as that was a relatively low manpower activity per gained unit of calorie and trade worth. This was especially true for the region of Småland which has always been known for having labor intensive and lovely farming due to the very large amount of rock and stones in the soil. This led to butter becoming a top 3 export from Sweden and a big income stream. I think I read somewhere that the general trend of population declines leading to increases in diary production was seen in some other European country after some war that devastated the population. Which could maybe give some additional explanation to the relative abundance of dairy culture in europe compared to other less warring regions. But I can't find the source paper now so take that info with a bunch of salt.
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Jul 7, 2023 10:08
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Thread favorite Jared Diamond wrote a lot about how those Vikings really loved their dairy farming even when it didn't make too much sense from a lamd-use perspective.
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Jul 7, 2023 10:46
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sullat posted:Thread favorite Jared Diamond wrote a lot about how those Vikings really loved their dairy farming even when it didn't make too much sense from a lamd-use perspective. IIRC that was in the context of trying to settle Greenland using dairy farming, while scoffing at those primitive seal-hunting Inuit who were there for thousands of years before, and hundreds of years after the vikings had long-abandoned their colonies.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:55
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They should have tried milking the seals instead. Mmmm, delicious seal cheese.
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Jul 7, 2023 18:25
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sullat posted:Thread favorite Jared Diamond wrote a lot about how those Vikings really loved their dairy farming even when it didn't make too much sense from a lamd-use perspective. From a land-use perspective, there's a lot of places that are pretty lovely for most crops, but if grass grows there, you can sustain nice herds of valuable livestock. Not all soil is equal. And being able to repurpose land for livestock is especially handy if you destroyed the local ecology by cutting down all the forests because you needed the wood at the time. A lot of Britain ended up terraformed for sheep for similar reasons, but it's not as spectacular as Iceland being just a barren rock where barely anything grows and the forests were wiped out for ships, and livestock was a necessity for civilization to survive year-round.
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Jul 7, 2023 18:54
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