Article is mainly about the Baltics, but I always wondered what Italians ate before tomatoes came from the Americas.
If you’re interested in what ancient romans ate, that seems well documented.<p>Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius</a>
Their giant mound of 53 million olive oil amphorae has always fascinated me: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio</a> 20 liters of oil per person annually.
I keep hoping I'll be able to get my hands on some silphium to see what it's like.
The majority of Italian food doesn’t actually use tomatoes. That impression is mostly because internationally-known Italian foods tend to use tomatoes (pizza for example.)
Pasta alla genovese is one such dish, it resembles modern ragu
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genovese_sauce" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genovese_sauce</a><p>That being said I think the ubiquitousness of tomato sauce even in modern Italian cuisine is overestimated.
Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth.<p><a href="https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellini-circa-1570" rel="nofollow">https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...</a>
> Onions, carrots, and celery<p>This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix?wprov=sfti1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix?wprov=sfti1</a>
Or Europeans before potatoes.
melanzana aka Aubergine aka eggplant
Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.<p>On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
One of the most praised recent restaurants in the United States is based on an attempt to reconstruct pre-Colombian cuisine from the Americas: <a href="https://owamni.com/" rel="nofollow">https://owamni.com/</a>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-became-the-best-new-restaurant-in-the-united-states" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-bec...</a>.
In that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me).<p>Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potato
I'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable.<p>Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.
no beef? bison were ubiquitous, though.
> no dairy<p>They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.
The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.
That makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it.<p>I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.