Pre-1650:
        Eating healthy has always been important to people, although ideas of what is healthy have often changed.  To avoid using practices such as bloodletting, doctors carefully monitored their usually wealthy patients’ daily habits.  Most important among these was what they ate and drank.
        If doctors advised, chefs followed.  Most head chefs, or majordomos, were expected to have at least the rudimentary knowledge about what was considered healthy.  Because of that, doctors, physicians, and their patrons, shared a common opinion on what was a healthy diet.
        Two things contributed to the idea of a healthy diet.  First was the assumption that cooking was the central process of life.  Seeds were cooked into plants, plants were cooked to produce raw foodstuffs, humans would cook the raw foodstuffs into edible meals and the internal heat of the body cooked the food into blood.
        The second assumption can be traced back to the Greeks, and to the man that most heavily influenced the ideas of the Middle Ages, Aristotle.  His elements—air, water, fire and earth—corresponded to the four fluids, or humors, that circulated in the body: blood (air), phlegm (water), yellow bile (fire) and black bile (earth).  Ideally, the human body was slightly warm and slightly moist, with variation depending on age, sex, and geography location.
        All foods were given a rating of their properties, dry or wet, hot or cold, from one to three.  Pepper was hot and dry in the third degree, while vinegar was cold and wet in the second degree.  The way a food was cooked was to add on the needed warmth and moistness.  That is why root vegetables, dry and cold, were to be stewed, and onions had to be fried.
        A meal that was close to perfect in the 16th century might be a blancmange, which is a thick puree of rice and chicken moistened with milk from ground almonds with sugar sprinkled on top.  The entire meal was made up of ingredients that were warm and moist.  A suckling pig, also moist, might also be served with a cameline sauce of cool, moist vinegar with warm raisins and hot, dry spices.
        On top of this meal, there would of course be wine.  Health experts of the day viewed wine as having great medial properties.  But, red wine tends to be cold and dry, so it was often served warm with added sugar and spices, creating a drink called hypocras.  Armed with this knowledge, the 16th century majordomo was prepared to not only make people’s stomachs happy, but keep them in good health too.

        Post-1650:
        Northern Europe experienced a change of views in the middle of the 17th century about health and cooking.  Physicians who gained ideas from Paracelsus, a doctor from Germany in the 1520s, believed that the idea of cooking being central to the life cycle and the four Aristotelian elements were wrong, and had to be revised.  And so the modern diet of the northern Europeans was born.
        It was the technology of distillation that seems to have contributed to this change.  Chemists in the late Middle Ages began to experiment with heating a variety of natural substances, many of them edible.  They noticed that the original material separated into three parts: a volatile fluid, an oily substance, and a solid residue.
        This gave the chemists the idea that there were three, not four, elements.  Mercury (not the chemical of the same name) was the fluid, sulfur (not the chemical) was the oily substance, and salt (not the common table salt) was the residue.  In this new theory, salt gave the taste, mercury gave the smell, and sulfur not only brought sweetness, it bound the other two together.
        Not only were the four Aristotelian elements replaced, fermentation became the central process of life.  Seeds fermented in the soil to grow into plants.  Foodstuffs from plants were fermented into wine, beer, bread and other foods.  Inside the stomach, gastric juices acted on foods to turn them into a white, milky fluid, which then mixed with alkaline bile.  This mixture fermented into the body fluids needed to survive.
        Cooks responded the only way they could, they changed dishes.  For the first time, oysters, anchovies, green vegetables, mushrooms, and fruits were eaten because they fermented so readily.  As fresh vegetables began to become common, the science of horticulture rose in popularity.  Before, the melon was too cold and moist to be consumed.  Now, it was a popular and tasty dish.
        But with this came a price.  To make sauces in this new diet, cooks used ingredients rich in oil, such as butter or lard.  They were combined with items high in salt, such as flour and table salt, and items high in mercury, such as vinegar and wine.  The first recipe for roux, a combination of fat and flour, with wine or stock to moisten, appeared in 1651.  Although fresh fruit and vegetables helped, today the diet of lard and other fatty foods are the reason of high obesity in nations that were settled by Northern Europeans.
        The hot and spicy hypocras gave way to cool wines.  Sparkling mineral waters became very popular as spas opened across Europe.  Sparkling champagne was first produced late in the 17th century.  Sugar was no longer used in the entire meal, and instead was given a special dish, dessert, which was prepared in a separate kitchen.  Land animals, especially beef, became the base of stock, bouillon, or jellies.

        What If:
        In our own history Paracelsus was adopted only in northern Europe.  English, German and French speaking countries in Europe, the U. S., Canada and Australia are the followers of this diet.  The Islamic and Spanish worlds remained isolated from this new dietary theory.  It is not that hard to imagine Paracelsus remaining a minor doctor in Germany, with his ideas never being accepted.  Northern Europe keeps its dietary theory centered on cooking and the four elements.  What then?
 

        Effects:
        It is impossible to imagine all the changes that could result from northern Europe having a different diet.  A man, who in our history died from a heart attack, might live on to father another son.  This son may go on to marry the woman that in our history gave birth to the lineage that resulted in Winston Churchill.  This can get out of control.
        However, changes to the diet in 1650, or in this case no change, could have other dietary changes down the road.  For example, the change in 1650 to eating fresh fruits and vegetables is what has allowed the modern vegetation movement to happen.  Imagine a world in which fresh fruits and vegetables are considered to be lowly, like eating raw fish.  How serious would a person suggesting eating only these items be taken?
        Of course, you would have dietary cults just like today.  Just like there are people who won’t eat carbohydrates today, you will have people that only eat vegetables and fruits.  But, while the vegetarians have influenced some of mainstream ideas on cooking, it is doubtful that they would be able to in this alternate world.  Health might worse off because of this.
        This world won’t, however, have a large use of fat and other oils in cooking.  Throwing fat back on anything will not become common.  Frying, which dries out something, will not be common except for items like onions.  Southern American cooking would be split.  The upper classes, the plantation owners and their equals in modern society, will eat what the common northern European cuisine would have.
        Lower classes will, as often true in a society, be better off.  Melons, and other fresh fruits and vegetables will be the only things available for the slaves and poor whites.  In fact, because eating things fresh takes less preparation time, it’s plausible to see the lower southern classes develop ideas of fresh salads and other vegetarian ideas.  So perhaps I was wrong in saying there would be no vegetarians.
        In the Northern states of America, the food will be less influenced by the Northern Europeans, and instead show influences from the three major ethnic groups that immigrated to America.  Irish, Italian and German.  In this world, the Italians have not changed at all, and will still bring their olives and tomatoes.  German food would be the same as that in the upper Southern classes, the alternate northern European culinary tastes.
        It is interesting, to look at the Irish.  In our history, the potato was looked down on, and still would be in this alternate history.  The Irish would still have some influences from the alternate northern European foods.  Frying onions was a common thing to do, and instead of boiling the potatoes you might see fried potatoes being a common sign of Irish cuisine.

        In Closing:
        In this short essay, I have focused mostly on the changes to American cuisine.  This might be because I am an America, but I have other reasons.  Changes to the northern European cuisine would keep it the same as I described earlier.  However, what the upper class looks down on is usually what the lower class eats.  That would change the diet of the African-Americans and the Irish, two key groups in American history.  It is therefore interesting to imagine what would a dinner table in this Alternate World look like.  Enjoy!

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