America
Introducing the Tomato: Madde Apples and Love Apples
Like with corn, the origin of the tomato had already been lost less than 100 years after it was discovered. Gerard cautions against eating the “Raging Apple” as he calls what I believe we’d refer to as a “Roma” tomato because they can be poisonous (because the tomato is in the same family as belladonna [...]
Turkey Wheate from John Gerard’s Herbal
The first in a series of posts celebrating Gerard’s 1597 masterpiece The Herball or Generall historie of plantes. Gerard’s Herball was one of the first publications to discuss the New World food basket that had been imported over the last century. Gerard, like most European farmers, was skeptical: These kinds of Graine were first brought [...]
Chile Sauce Recipe found in 1836 cookbook
I found this recipe for chile sauce inside my well-used copy of The New England Cookbook or Young Housekeeper’s Guide (New Haven, 1836). You’ll notice the recipe calls for two “sweet” spices (and sugar – though not human flesh), cloves and cinnamon, as well as two cups of vinegar (which seems like a lot of [...]
Chiles verdes rellenos (picadillo)
Recipe taken from Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California itself a translation of Encarnación Pinedo’s, El cocinero español (San Francisco, 1898), the first Spanish language cookery text published in California. Pinedo presents her recipes as Spanish (despite the profusion of Mexican ingredients) and in the European tradition traced from Apicius (whom she names) through [...]
Golden Apples, Crimson Stew
1534: A Spanish trader is returning to his ship in Seville after another unsuccessful attempt to sell his carefully tended hull full of tomato plants. The actual tomatoes that he’d brought had long ago rotted en route, and he’d had a hell of a time explaining to his customers what, precisely, the tomatoes were for. [...]
Food in the Americas – The History of the New World by Girolamo Benzoni
Some of the first images of Native Americans in the New World were captured in La Historia del Mondo Nuovo di M. Girolamo Benzoni Milanese, Venetia, 1565. Most of the images are of everyday life in South America (when they don’t depict the violence of the Spanish against the natives – a violence that, while [...]
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