A Historian’s Take on Food and Food Politics
You know, you read in cookbooks that this or that is the real or the best or the most authentic recipe for a certain dish. Then the more you poke around, the more you realize that there are all kinds of variants on the basic recipe. Indeed I am not sure that is even the [...]
Read: Alcuscuz de maiz (Couscous of corn) in early nineteenth-century Mexico
Ok, what do I mean by culinary history? Culinary (from the Latin culina, kitchen) history traces the history of the (guess) the kitchen or more generally, the techniques used to turn plants and animals into food.
Thesis. 1492 (or the Columbian Exchange) is a complete non-event in culinary history.
Why? Well, the kitchens and techniques that went [...]
Third or fourth pass grinding barley on a metate
Lots more questions than I can take up. But one that several commentators have raised is “Why did the simple grindstone survive until now in Mexico when in many parts of Eurasia it was abandoned about two or three centuries BC?”
First, the Mexicans did take up the [...]
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