👀 Eat the past
#336 | Recipes that make you go “huhhh?”
Hello folks,
This is my first stab at writing a Thing and I hope it’s interesting and obscura-ish enough for you fine readers.
For those of you at the intersection of food porn and history, do I have the perfect internet creator for you.
Tasting History is a YouTube channel run by a delightful chap who digs out an ancient recipe from yore, dives into the history of the dish, and recreates it in his kitchen. And this isn’t a food blogger who just does a quick google of whatever he’s cooking, no no. This guy digs out ancient texts, scours them for mentions of recipes, traces the origins of dish and recreates them as faithfully as he can.
This means a deep dive into the fare served to the First Class passengers of the Titanic and cooking the spread that these unfortunate Richie Riches ate before they plunged to their icy deaths.
It means an exploration and preparation of Buttered Beere (no, not of the Harry Potter variety) and how it was born in Tudor times as a calorie bomb to give adequate nutrition to the people in Renaissance England.
It even means an eye-bogglingly detailed look-and-cook into the history of south-Indian payasam and how it was born under King Someshwara’s rule during the Western Chalukya empire in the 12th century. Did you know that? I sure didn’t, and as a payasam aficionado who eats more than she should at any South Indian family function, knowing where it came from has made me enjoy that ancient yumminess more than I did before.
Go binge-watch (and binge?)
Bye!
Divya
Part-time marketing consultant, full-time worrier
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