TL Changes in Food/Food Recipes, Cooking, and general ingredients

[warellis]

Considering the differences in technology for each TL, in what ways has food changed over the years with different TLs? Has general cooking advanced or food preparation advanced when compared to earlier TLs compared to today?

[RGTraynor]

Yes and no.

On the "no" side, this is one of the areas where the concept of descriptive TLs as a generic scale falls flat on its face. There's so much about food and recipes that can be done with the same foodstuffs as were around a thousand years ago, using equipment that could easily be made with Iron Age technology.

On the "yes" side, there are immense changes. How much does refrigeration make possible? Ovens that can be set for an even, predictable temperature? Power mixers? Freeze-dried or dehydrated foods? Factory-prepared mixes? Pure food and drink laws? Distilling technology? (Hell, how about just what's available by whomping it onto a sailing ship, instead of humping some saddlebags over a six thousand mile bandit-infested route?)

Beyond that, I look to my own lifetime. I'm 55, a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. In the city of my birth, population 90,000 and the immediate southern suburb of Boston, far into the 1970s, the only "ethnic" restaurants were pizza joints. There was a single Chinese restaurant in town. There was a single Lebanese restaurant in town (an artifact of an area by the shipyard settled by Lebanese immigrants). That was it.

Foods in the markets? Into my college days, for several months of the year, fresh produce did not exist: you could have canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, but anything "fresh" was cellophane wrapped, horribly expensive, tasted like cardboard and there was damned little of it. The concept of ethnic foods ... well, there'd be a shelf of soy sauce and packages of lo mein noodles, and a shelf with a few boxes of that Old El Paso brand taco shells and sauce packets, and that was about it.

So, say, while the range of recipes possible with local foods isn't significantly different than a century or a millennium ago, the range of foods vastly increases with transportation and refrigeration technology.

[Anaraxes]

TL also generally improves the quality and consistency of food, as well as the variety. If there were some sort of cross-timeline Iron Chef competition, the lower TL could quite reasonably suffer penalties even if trying the very same recipe, because their ingredients aren't so uniform -- thus requiring higher skill to monitor and adapt, rather than just putting them on regulated heat for a measured amount of time (themselves both higher-tech advances).

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Short answer, yes. Trade has spread many crops around the world which means more diverse bunches of ingredients, increasing agricultural technology has given us more food per capita (relatively recently, anyway), and advances in pyrotechnology, metallurgy, food chemistry, and standardized measurements has made it much easier for a lot more people to undertake a lot more cooking operations. I don't have convenient answers in GURPS terms (I keep noodling with an outline for a book which will certainly never see print), but I'd recommend Laudan's Cusine and Empire for an interesting global overview of the technical and cultural development of cooking over the past 3000 years or so.

[warellis]

Interesting. I was asking this because I remember reading somewhere that in 1950s cookbooks, there were things like there were more recipes for jelly than there were for salads and that fewer fresh vegetables and fewer meats were available back then.

Of course I also thought about food from earlier periods, and still now in many places not the West, where people really would try to eat every part of the animal.

Still, wasn't the 1940s & 1950s/1960s really when refrigeration started to appear on trucks and such? How come fresh vegetables, and meat, were less available even with that?

Also I've seen on shows like the "Supersizers Eat" where for the historical periods, like cooking food using recipes from the 1500s or 1700s/1800s, that often the food is ruined with the recipe being used, like charbroiling a big lump of meat when there are better ways to cook it/better recipes to use it with or something that modern chefs have access to.

[Flyndaran]

We forget how amazing it is that we can combine ingredients separated by thousands of miles and seasons of ripeness.

The chemistry is known far better now, so scientific experimentation rather than wild trial and error can be done.

On a personal note many foods lacking otherwise necessary ingredients can be made at modern tech levels. Sugar or gluten free foods for example.
As much as I gripe about the rarity and blandness of diabetic friendly foods, just 100 years ago, I would simply eat ONLY meat and vegetables or risk dying early.

[Flyndaran]

Ancient recipes weren't recipes as we know them. They were more like reminders for people that already knew what they wanted. So I doubt re-enactors followed or even could follow all the unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and preferences of the time and place.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by warellis

Still, wasn't the 1940s & 1950s/1960s really when refrigeration started to appear on trucks and such? How come fresh vegetables, and meat, were less available even with that?

For meats this started up in the late 19th century - rail lines out of Chicago, and refrigerated freighters out of Buenos Aires.

The reasons it doesn't work so much for fruits and vegetables is many of them don't chill well - let alone freeze - which means you need to ship them *fast* to the final market - and that there are gaps between the growing seasons, at least until large scale production starts up in Chile - what with being in the Southern Hemisphere and with lots of latitude and altitude variations to adjust the temperature curves and harvest timing.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by malloyd

For meats this started up in the late 19th century - rail lines out of Chicago, and refrigerated freighters out of Buenos Aires.
....

Amazing it took so long to think of saw dust to insulate the ice for long voyages. I recently watched a documentary on refrigeration.

[Agemegos]

I have some Fifties recipe books, and even a facsimile of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. There are lots and lots of recipes in the old books — a lot more than in any of my Nigella Lawson books. The books are big and thick, with small type, narrow margins, and few photographs. You often find two or three recipes for the "same" dish, with substituted ingredients, such a s plum pudding recipe and another plum pudding recipe with breadcrumbs instead of flour, of cheesecake recipes with cream cheese and others with cottage cheese. I have one book open to a page with separate recipes for herring roes on toast and fried cod's roe on toast. (The herring roes are coated with seasoned flour and fried whole, then put onto toast with bloater paste, but the cod's roe is cut into slices then dipped in seasoned flour and fried, then served on toast with bacon.)

I think that before refrigeration and long-distance shipping of food cooking was a lot more seasonal, and often just plain chancy. If you lived in a small settlement that depended on local supplies you needed to be able to cook what happened to be in the shop or market that day. You didn't get to have a small number of regular standby dishes that you ground out day in and day out: you had to cook different things from season to season or from time to time because of what was available when.

Also, there was a lot less highly-prepared stuff available before food factories and freezers. If you want to serve a Bavarois now you buy a frozen one in a supermarket and thaw it. In the Sixties, you got milk, sugar, eggs, gelatine, cream etc. and made it yourself. Similarly with cakes and biscuits (cookies). A modern cookbook doesn't have recipes for ginger nuts and melting moments and so forth because those are now made in factories, not at home.