Alternate Food & Drink Thread

Like the Alternate Weapons of War Thread and similar, but with food and drink.

I hear Persians wouldn't rice w/o the Mongols.

Also, without the Spanish conquests in the Americas and subsequent global trading empire, India wouldn't have chillis.

Sengoku and Tokugawa Japan would have alot fewer fat people, were it not for the Portugese.

That's what I've got for now.

Oh, this leaves room open for many possibilities !

If the Turkish armies weren't defeated at the gates of Vienna, the Viennese would never discover the large stash of sacks with great coffee beans lying in the Ottoman field camp. And Vienna wouldn't be associated that much with a love for coffee or "Viennese Turkish Coffee" - which, incidentally, started becoming hugely popular elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire as well, once it became popular in Vienna.

If the ancient Magyars never settled in central Europe, we'd probably never have the basic recipe for lečo (lecsó) It's a kind of a vegetable stew (often with a dash of scrambled eggs added to the mix). Amusingly, the discovery of new continents also changed the recipes for lečo forever : After paprika and tomatos and other New World vegetables became hugely popular and widespread in the Kingdom of Hungary, they quickly became favoured ingredients in all lečo (lecsó) recipes, replacing the previous ingredients. And it hasn't changed since. In fact, a few years ago, when I was watching an interesting documentary about Hungarian historians conducting some experimental archeology by building an ancient Magyar settlement from scratch (using only the tech of the time), even the recipe for lečo they used was strikingly medieval. They only used herbs and vegetables that were available in the steppes and surrounding forests or the ones they bought or brought with them. Nice to see the old original recipes resurrected.

Another culinary thing we can thank the Ottomans for : Goulash. The name itself comes from the language of the various Tatar nationalities that served the Ottoman Empire as mercenary cavalrymen. They called it kulash. Balkan and Hungarian POWs who managed to escape brought back the idea for the recipe with them, since they saw the Tatar soldiers preparing it often, as a simple, tasty, stew-like meal (not completely unlike the lecsó).

I'm also sure some of the Slovak vocabulary for various dairy products and sheepherding-related concepts would be quite different if it weren't for the greater proliferation of etnic Wallachians in various parts of the Hungarian crown during the Late Middle Ages. The same goes for this type of vocabulary among the other nationalities that live under the Carpathians, even as far west as Moravia.

I'm sure that many former East Block countries (including us) would have a far smaller influence by Russian and Caucasian cuisines if we never became part of said faction. A high number of these influences entered our culinary practices during the Communist era and many of these more exotic recipes are still popular today.

Probably the most famous Balkan import that could have been delayed or butterflied away is ćevapi (aka čevabčiči). They are rather similar to our meat medallions, in all but shape.

The spread of corn-focused agriculture across northern Central America and North America could have developed differently, if PODs sufficient enough would subvert the OTL development of its spreading.

Flocculencio recently told me that cassava just never caught on in India for one reason or other (with some exceptions, of course) :

Flocculencio said:

Potatoes and tomatoes were adopted extremely quickly in India, along with chillies. I'm unsure of exact dates but the Spanish had spread New World crops to China by the 1550s so I'm sure India can't have been too far behind.

Cassava is interesting- it never really got used much in India, and still isn't with the exception of the state of Kerala. In the 1920s, the local Maharaja of Travancore was experimenting with introducing new crops to provide his people with resources to prevent famine. One of the crops he introduced was cassava (which we call kappa). The people found that it goes incredibly well with a particular type of fish curry and it's a favourite to this day- my wife just made some last Saturday, in fact.

As for spices- again we come to Kerala which was the global centre of pepper production. Cinnamon and cardamom are also cultivated there. The other two big spices- cloves and nutmeg- are much much harder to actually grow- at least on a commercial scale- and one suspects that there was little incentive to do so as the costs of importing said spices to India probably weren't that huge, given the vast wealth flowing into the local economy from the much more high volume pepper trade. Most Indian cuisines don't really do that much with cloves and nutmeg anyway, again with the exception of Kerala cuisine, presumably since the Malabar ports of Kerala were the spice entrepots.

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