Alternate Foods and Drinks
- Thread starter DominusNovus
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Do you want something sweet while still being beef? Do you think steak and ribs are too expensive? Well come on down to Burger Equine! We serve genuine Horse burgers for dirt cheap! Try out our menu of the Seabiscuit Fish Sandwich, The juicy and tender Stallion-sized meal, or a colt-sized meal for the kids!
In Veneto it is arguably as common if not more common than beef: foal meatballs area a delicacy. It should also be quite good, nutritionally speaking. (In Verona we also eat donkey ragout...)
Texture is quite nice, while taste is imho a bit inferior to beef, unless cured with some spices.
Another meat that could becomr more widespread is ostrich.
I have a halophytic world diet that centers around closed system maricultures of low trophic scale fish and crustaceans (food, fodder, dye and building material), fodder crops for ruminants, spirulina, brine fly and shrimp production for laysan duck/Indian runner hybrids with gardens of various hybrid tomatoes, potatoes, strawberry, hamburg like sea-parsley, etc...that have wild relative input.
Ossabaw pigs, maybe even "fields" of sea grass for sea turtle farming and of course with nypa grains.
It's not too pre-1900 but I mean it's the future anyways.
Ossabaw pigs, maybe even "fields" of sea grass for sea turtle farming and of course with nypa grains.
It's not too pre-1900 but I mean it's the future anyways.
Would love to see more cultures which had a thriving Aquaculture available, with Algae and other waterplants making more of an appearance, and Marshlands being reasonable enough farming areas that it wouldn't make sense going through the technical hassle of draining the land, unless there simply wasn't more available space
If more people have the gut bacteria to better assimilate nutrients from Seaweed like many Japanese and Ocean derived bacteria can break down especially sweet varieties of Seaweed for human consumption then I could see a "Strandloper" society develop throughout the at least arid coasts globally.
Marshlands are especially fertile and are in many ways along with riparian regions the basis of human agricultural development, aquaculture would have to develop inspite of/ without rather than because of marshs
Brains in general remain quite popular in a lot of cuisines. You can find beef brains (along with beef testicles) served in Bavaria. As for lamb brains, ever been to a Turkish restaurant? Kelle paça çorbası is a soup that involves boiling a whole lamb's head, including the brains. It's delicious!
I don't know what kind of food you make, but I use herbs much more than spices when cooking, except perhaps for the ubiquitous black pepper. What do you put in your pasta sauces? I'd wager basil, oregano and thyme are more likely to feature than cloves, nutmeg or allspice. When you steam or fry fish, aren't you inclined to add a little rosemary (if lean) or dill (if fatty)? Dill also goes great with cucumbers. Petits pois (canned green peas) are improved greatly by the presence of tarragon, and likewise green beans benefit from a generous sprinkling of summer savory. If you're making a full Scottish (or English) breakfast, marjoram does nicely on the fried mushrooms.
I think what might be the case though is that fewer people today really learn how to cook properly, don't season their food well with herbs, and then remedy the blandness by smothering it in things like ketchup or hot sauce.
Not "used to", seaweed is still eaten in the Hebrides and even on the West Coast, though admittedly much less frequently than used to be the case. I had some very nice seaweed oatcakes recently.
He was actually pre-empted, chronologically if not textually, by Jesus
(Mark 7:15, cf. Matthew 15:11)
There is an idea. Cuisine made mainly from condiments or sauces. Perhaps congealed.
But what if, instead, Christianity forbids pork too (this has quite complex theological implications, but lets handwave them for a moment...)?
I imagine that when the Americas are discovered turkey might have an increased role in European cuisine, but before, what could take pork's place?
Nothing. Pigs are terribly in the Levant because of the climate and foliage (might be I am thinking of goats), while in Europe you could let pigs forage for themselves. I simply cannot think of an animal that could take their place, especially as chickens and cows were most often kept for the milk and eggs that could be used by peasants to pay their taxes. I suppose there could be a greater focus on sheep, but then there is the question of if you eat lamb or mutton, due to the subject of wool.
yes. A world with less or no peppers would change LOTS of cuisine. And like tomatoes and potatoes there's lots of varieties too which we may never see. Would a world where peppers have less influence see less chilis too?
Do you think if starches were more diverse, we would have less globalized cuisine? Would food become more insular? I sometimes think regional recipes have spread because of the large variety of foods round the world which require, for example, tomato and onion as a start. Without cross compatible ingredient maybe everybody feels less excited about exploring potential fusion dishes, and recipes from other parts of the world. I can imagine shopping for original ingredients specific to one region would be so much more difficult! That's assuming most of us would be interested in recipes outside our communities.
Or would we see an increase in recipes which just say use a starchy root vegetable, such as potato, batata, turnip, yam... without specifying which to use. Giving extra freedom. Then again I imagine chefs would be trying to bridge those gaps. A role for celebrity chefs ITTL?
There's other edible starchy roots which people never really eat. So maybe they take a role in our diets too.
Without one of our main starch staples playing such a dominant role, do you think another would take its place? Maybe turnips and rutabaga spread, and our recipes using potatoes, use mashed turnip varieties instead. Farmers could grow and cultivate varieties unknown to us in OTL. Is it possible for a grassy wheat variety to evolve into something like corn/maize?
Another is citrus. The citrus fruits we know today originated from crossbreeding Etrog, Mandarin and Papeda and Pomelo. There's so many combinations and varieties, and yet most people only know the most widespread. Oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes ... So why not widespread use of a greater variety of citrus fruits? Maybe they're crossbred in slightly different ways. So we see grapefruit sized limes and orange colored lemons.
I would so LOVE to write a timeline story for you guys. Would you prefer I stick to one alternate history, such as a different direction for potatoes or tomatoes, or would you prefer a series of short stories from lots of different histories?
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Are they really? I had a friend who lived in Wales and thought i was making it up that that was part of the local cuisine. I was in Ireland and it was very hard to find cockles in any restaurant (I found it in only one) and most of the people I asked had never tried it, even though it's mentioned in Molly Mallone. I think the decline in eating shellfish in that part of the world could be due to industrialization and urbanisation leading to unsanitary coastal areas that were originally where they were harvested, leading to the association of shellfish with food poisoning.
More diversity of citrus fruits would be really cool, though i know other varieties may not be as easy to eat as fruit like bergamot and Seville oranges.
And yes, I would think it means people appropriate only the superficial elements of a cuisine (dash of tumeric here, some Cajun spice there). Even today, Chinese greens and things like okra or beets and parsnips have a hard time being used across major cultural regions. Anyway, today, other than for making trendy breads and gluten free crap, people don't just buy teff flour or millet or sorghum berries right? And oats and rye do not seemuch use outside of Europe.
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Oh this is fun...
-Any timeline where Currywurst catches on as fast food in the US is a timeline I'd move to right now
-A Vinland time line seems likely to feature use of whales, seals, seabirds and their eggs, and dulse seaweed was consumed in Viking era norway. I would expect a variety of types of booze based on the number of native fruits. Boiled seal flipper preserved in sour whey with barley-corn-oat bread flavored with maple syrup and wild nuts with blueberry maple wine anyone?
-Hard Cider was more popular than beer before prohibition, but during Prohibition entire orchards were burnt to the ground, to the point where the only cider-apples to survive were on abandoned land. So avoiding prohibition would likely make Hard Cider at the very least more popular than it is today, if not be the most popular type of booze in the US. Plus it should be tastier.
-Any timeline where Currywurst catches on as fast food in the US is a timeline I'd move to right now
-A Vinland time line seems likely to feature use of whales, seals, seabirds and their eggs, and dulse seaweed was consumed in Viking era norway. I would expect a variety of types of booze based on the number of native fruits. Boiled seal flipper preserved in sour whey with barley-corn-oat bread flavored with maple syrup and wild nuts with blueberry maple wine anyone?
-Hard Cider was more popular than beer before prohibition, but during Prohibition entire orchards were burnt to the ground, to the point where the only cider-apples to survive were on abandoned land. So avoiding prohibition would likely make Hard Cider at the very least more popular than it is today, if not be the most popular type of booze in the US. Plus it should be tastier.
Very interesting thread. Personally I would like to see a TL with a more varied array of sodas. OTL the only real flavors are cola and root beer. Followed by the various fruit flavors like cherry and orange or grape. However I would like to see other flavors catch on more. Like huckleberry for instance (I found a brand recently that carries this and love it) but others like blueberry, blackberry and raspberry. I am sure there are more but that all I can think of right now
There is an argument that until very recently that was not true. When Archaeologists dig in the region they can tell which settlements are Jewish by the lack of pigs. Jews historically were a nomadic people in a place that was terrible for herding pigs, the Arabian desert. It was until the destruction of the famous cedar forests, which took centuries to happen, that the region became terrible for pigs.
You are right on European, especially Northern European peoples, swine was by and large our only source of red meat consistently. Other wise our protein would be wildlife and fish. I guarantee you we would have seen mass extinctions then. Sheep would not become numerous enough to eat large scale until the 15th century. In Southern Europe the difference was how long people were living there. You saw the destruction of not only the forests but the predators that lived in them, or the adaption by the people to deal with them. Northern Europe was the equivalent of the American West until the last 500 years. Filled with vast forests and predators. The thing is with cattle, they need so much food to survive that people might not. The areas devoted to gathering hay will eat up such vast areas that Northern Europeans will starve.
Poultry and rabbits might be a replacement but there is missing nutrients in both that only red meat provides.
There are no nutrients that only red meat provides, which is good because most people had little access to red meat on any kind of regular basis until the modern era. You might be thinking of vitamin B12, but that is found in a broad range of meats, or of rabbit starvation, but that refers to having very little fat at all, and fish, oils, etc. are a perfectly good substitute. The fact that the American Indians did pretty much just fine with zero access to red meat outside of game (and llamas and a few relatives in South America) kind of indicates that.
That also shows that having "mass extinctions" of people in Northern Europe is an obvious gross exaggeration, considering that nothing of the sort happened in the Americas. I seriously doubt that Europeans will somehow be more likely to die than people with only guinea pigs, turkeys, and llamas (and those not even everywhere) from nutritional shortages when, as you admit, they still have access to fish (with, I must remind you, significantly better boats and ships to collect seafood from than the American Indians possessed), poultry, rabbits, sheep, goats, and cows.
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