3/7/2026 at 5:52:15 PM
Article is mainly about the Baltics, but I always wondered what Italians ate before tomatoes came from the Americas.by thisismyweakarm
3/7/2026 at 7:14:22 PM
If you’re interested in what ancient romans ate, that seems well documented.Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine.
by thih9
3/7/2026 at 9:56:19 PM
Their giant mound of 53 million olive oil amphorae has always fascinated me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio 20 liters of oil per person annually.by recursivecaveat
3/8/2026 at 3:57:34 AM
That is an amazing read, thank you for sharing. Not often you see a landfill for welfare recipients turned into a holy place that the popes visit and wealthy people store their wineby malfist
3/7/2026 at 9:20:26 PM
I keep hoping I'll be able to get my hands on some silphium to see what it's like.by hedgehog
3/7/2026 at 7:15:52 PM
Pasta alla genovese is one such dish, it resembles modern ragu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genovese_sauceThat being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.
by throwaway110022
3/7/2026 at 7:27:16 PM
Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth.https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...
by card_zero
3/7/2026 at 11:32:03 PM
> Onions, carrots, and celeryThis is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix.
by Renaud
3/8/2026 at 7:51:24 AM
In Cajun food, bell peppers replace carrots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_trinity_(cooking)by huhkerrf
3/9/2026 at 1:32:37 PM
Fascinating to see that Mirepoix is such and old base that it was imported into the new continent and adapted with what was available locally!by Renaud
3/7/2026 at 7:39:17 PM
The majority of Italian food doesn’t actually use tomatoes. That impression is mostly because internationally-known Italian foods tend to use tomatoes (pizza for example.)by keiferski
3/8/2026 at 1:36:05 AM
Pizza like its predecessor Focaccia (panis focacius in Roman times) was initially tomato-less. Even today many pizzerias offer pizza bianca in their menusby alkyon
3/7/2026 at 7:30:38 PM
Or Europeans before potatoes.by analog31
3/7/2026 at 8:56:36 PM
Or peppers. Hungary without paprika!by hedgehog
3/8/2026 at 3:52:41 AM
Not to mention India without the spicy peppers...by davidgay
3/7/2026 at 8:06:12 PM
I heard turnips used to be all the rage.by zppln
3/7/2026 at 8:46:49 PM
Although it should be noted that modern turnip varieties are significantly more flavorful and sweet than pre-Columbian exchange era turnips. The old varieties were usually very bland so it didn’t take much for another tuber to displace it.by throwup238
3/8/2026 at 3:32:57 PM
There is a YouTube channel and Substack called “Forgotten Italian Classics” that explores old regional specialties. This might be up your alley.by antonymoose
3/8/2026 at 1:25:40 AM
My understanding is a lot of northern Italian recipes are basically the same as their pre colonial versions, like ragu bianco.by jasonwatkinspdx
3/7/2026 at 8:11:01 PM
melanzana aka Aubergine aka eggplantby burgreblast
3/7/2026 at 8:16:35 PM
Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
by ginko
3/7/2026 at 9:43:18 PM
One of the most praised recent restaurants in the United States is based on an attempt to reconstruct pre-Colombian cuisine from the Americas: https://owamni.com/, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-bec....by hyperpape
3/7/2026 at 11:49:00 PM
In that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me).Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
by bee_rider
3/8/2026 at 2:48:12 AM
> if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to meHaving grown up on plenty of both wild venison and farmed cattle, they are pretty different, not to mention that different types of venison are also quite different from each other. So I'm not sure I would consider venison and beef interchangeable simply by familiarity. White tailed deer and gemsbok, specifically, I find the best tasting and much better than beef.
by technothrasher
3/8/2026 at 5:44:19 PM
Venison is very different from beef. The most beef-like thing I've had is ostrich (which you wouldn't expect), even though it has subtle differences.by nephihaha
3/7/2026 at 9:28:30 PM
> no dairyThey couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
by mmooss
3/7/2026 at 9:34:14 PM
The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.by AlotOfReading
3/8/2026 at 12:43:28 AM
That makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it.I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.
by mmooss
3/8/2026 at 2:43:36 AM
Not going to get into the social darwinism stuff. We can empirically measure an apparent selective pressure for lactase persistence, but it's an open question without clear answers what the factors driving that are.I think you're missing why milk is useful though. Dairy allows you to take resources that aren't calorically useful like grasslands and turn them into food. You can consume it either immediately or later via preservation techniques like cheese. Even if you consume it immediately, milk is a seasonal product.
Dairy also isn't the only way of turning unusable resources into food though. You can eat the animal, for example. That's less efficient if you're limited to a single species, but cattle and other large livestock suitable for the scale of milk production you're talking about are so phenomenally inefficient that you're likely better off if you consume more efficient animals instead.
by AlotOfReading
3/8/2026 at 10:57:57 AM
> social darwinismThere is none of that in my comment.
> I think you're missing why milk is useful though.
? I was saying it is useful, and therefore I expect Homo sapiens would adapt to it.
After writing the GP I was told that humans, and some or all mammals, have a gene that disables lactose tolerance when they reach the stage of life where they no longer need milk. A miniority of humans have a mutation that stops that process, making them lactose-tolerent.
Why haven't we evolved to consume milk lifelong, given its obvious advantages (or why have we evolved to become lactose-intolerent past early childhood)?
A guess: Obviously milk consumption is inherited from mammal ancestors. That provides plenty of time (66 million years +) and population to evolve lifelong lactose digestion.
But other mammals don't have much need for that adaptation - for the most part, they can't figure out obtaining milk from another species as a regular food source. Human ancestors didn't figure out tool use until 2.6-3.3 million years ago; would we have figured it out then?
My guess is that it required domestication of animals ~12 thousand years ago before non-childhood milk consumption was commonplace. 12,000 years isn't much time to evolve much.
by mmooss
3/8/2026 at 1:16:44 AM
> On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus.Not at all. Many pre columbian foods remain popular today, like tamales. Corn, beans, squash, fish, nuts, and tropical fruit were all staple foods in pre contact Mesoamerica. Central American islanders were big on grilling fish over coals.
I don't think it was a miserably plain diet by any means.
by jasonwatkinspdx
3/7/2026 at 9:10:57 PM
Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potatoby lava_pidgeon
3/7/2026 at 9:23:58 PM
I'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable.Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.
by ginko
3/7/2026 at 10:46:18 PM
no beef? bison were ubiquitous, though.by jjtheblunt