I call bullshit on his selection of dishes, which for instance ignores what is supposedly the most popular meal in the UK, invented by Bengali immigrants in I think the 70s. Or for that matter half of the dishes on fast food menus in the US, many of which are post-war (in many cases post-20th century) creations. He doesn't seem to give any credit to such innovations at all, with no apparent justification.

More generally, I strongly suspect the ostensible narrow time range of (surviving) innovation is as he hints at largely an artefact of when cookbooks became a thing. Which is in turn presumably in large part a function of the industrial revolution, urbanisation and moving away from subsistence diets.

I'm not going to read the whole thing, but basically second 1. I would temper GY in that the Columbian Exchange really does change everything, and there probably was an acceleration of change in the period named.

Oh, sure. I'm more quibbling with the end point than the start point, and the fact that we really only know about dishes if they survive or if someone writes them down. I mean, there's middens, but they don't exactly preserve recipes.

It's like looking only at Disney's output and claiming that real story innovation only occurred between the times of Charles Perrault and Walt Disney.

1 is true. The kids and I discovered recently that nachos were invented in 1943 in Piedras Negras, Mexico, when a Mexican restaurant improvised to accommodate a bunch of white ladies from the nearby base in Eagle Pass, Texas, and then the craze took off from there.

That was me.

Yeah, I had Taco Bell especially in mind when I posted 2. I'm assuming the naked chicken chalupa does not date back to the 18th century.

2 s/b 1, obvs.

Turducken. And what's that burger that's chicken between two burger patties?

8: A swinging weekend?

"in 1965 women in America spent - on average - two hours a day cooking."
and they were being urged home economists in the employ of Big Food to make weineroni casseroles and Spaghetti O jello, and meat-cakes of layered bologna and cream cheese. No wonder they ran screaming from the kitchen.

Honestly "slaves in Louisiana were eating a gumbo-esque Okra stew that was labelled 'gumbo' since the early to mid 1700s, 1802 was simply the first recorded instance of the dish" is a hell of a proviso. How many of the dates are a product of when people bothered to record what was being cooked, rather than when particular dishes emerged? (There's also the question of "what is a 'dish'" and "what sorts of things are you apt to think of when asked to name a dish".)

That guy posts a lot of really great Chinese recipes, though, and his youtube channel is good.

Also I think that regardless of how accurate his proposed answer is (it's kind of plausible-seeming but god knows what that gets you), his suggestion to just buy stuff and keep it around is solid. I've made pasta sauce with salmon, peas, cream, and shaoxhing wine that is presumably not a super traditional use of the last ingredient but was tasty!

A couple years back, I was staying with friends in central Switzerland, and we had macaroni and cheese. I remarked on what I assumed was Americanization, and my hosts informed me that their part of the world had been eating Aelplermagronen since the time of the Romans. Dried pasta being an efficient way to market Italian wheat.

But here's some guy dating it to the 1870s (or even 1930s): https://www.littlezurichkitchen.ch/alplermagronen/

To add to the general consensus in the thread, I'd suggest that there's another component of the development of mass culture.

I remember stories about the ways in which the development of radio helped wash out regional differences (famously Harry Smith, as a party game, could tell people what County they grew up in based on their accent -- 20 years later that wouldn't have been possible because the mass culture of radio eliminated some of the ultra-local linguistic markers). I think cookbooks mark a similar process by which there becomes a standardized version of foods which replaced dozens of local variations (That still occurs, of course, Ulam, a documentary about Filipino food mentions that there are standards of Filipino cuisine and that every island makes them differently).

which for instance ignores what is supposedly the most popular meal in the UK, invented by Bengali immigrants in I think the 70s

The chip butty?

Caesar salad - not actually invented by Julius Caesar! Not even named after him!

13: Did we at least invent really orange powdered cheese?

"in 1965 women in America spent - on average - two hours a day cooking."

Part of the change surely has to be the continuing victory of the anti-wanking movement, in this case represented by the abolition of proper breakfast and its replacement by cereal. Cooking a proper breakfast would be surely a good 20 minutes per day at least. Now breakfast for most Americans doesn't really involve cooking at all.

1 makes a good point- I wonder if you find a similar pattern in the first recorded use of a word and the development of printing?

In culinary terms, our era will be remembered for the invention of chicken fingers.

Plus who actually believes that all recipes are millennia old? This is a kind of cultural change blindness: the idea that, everywhere outside your home country, things are now as they have always been (or would be if not for Western interference).

And you have to pick your recipes very carefully and be very specific. Roast beef is not recent. Beef stew is not recent. Grilled fish is not recent. Curry is not recent. Pies and puddings and cakes and dumplings and breads are not recent.

Part of the change surely has to be the continuing victory of the anti-wanking movement,

That movement suffered a serious setback recently let me tell you...

"the cultures at the intersection of great migrations or trade routes seem to have some pretty damn interesting food"

Ah yes! Hence the growth of the great food centres of Europe: Hamburg, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Bristol, Kiel, Antwerp. Poor old Paris never stood a chance.

1 makes a good point- I wonder if you find a similar pattern in the first recorded use of a word and the development of printing?

See Shakespeare being credited as "inventing" thousands of words, that being defined as "first recorded printed use of the word".

I miss eating Mantou. Since I'm staying at my parents, I can't go get it on essential trips because the nearest Chinese grocery is too far to justify.

There's a Chinese grocery near me, but I don't know what Mantou is.

I'm getting tired of home cooking. I should order soup dumplings.

Google says it just a steamed bun. Maybe I could get that at the Chinese bakery which I've always been afraid to walk into because it's called "Pink Box" and I'm saving myself for marriage.

Chinese cuisine has dozens of items whose name gets shortened/translated to "steamed bun".

I didn't have the energy to make a 100 words for snow joke about that.

Anyway, life is like a box of steamed buns.

See Shakespeare being credited as "inventing" thousands of words, that being defined as "first recorded printed use of the word".

Many of which have now been backdated anyway.

I never thought one way or another about that Shakespeare factoid, but the dismantling of it makes perfect sense.

Shakespeare invented Scottish people feeling guilty about killing somebody.

I never thought one way or another about that Shakespeare factoid, but the dismantling of it makes perfect sense.

It (the dismantling) was definitely pointed out to us when we were studying Shakespeare at school.

I have a cookbook that was compiled from lots of historic cooking books, which contains loads of recipes that are dated to the 17th century, and which were, presumably, much older, but not written down. For obvious reasons already mentioned. Books, for example, being extremely expensive things not commonly owned by the people who actually did the cooking.

I wonder if an upper decker was invented by the writers of McGruber?

I think he's right though in that a huge part of the decline of modern food is that domestic cooks don't put the hours in, and most people have grown up eating crudely flavoured crud. Now, a lot of peasant food is coarsely flavoured crud and you get very sick of it. But there is a difference between crudity and coarseness -- between eating fresh potatoes every fucking day for six months and factory made food which is surely important.

I've been rereading a lot of Elizabeth David in the last few days and she stands exactly on the point where labour-intensive foods (and restaurants) were being smushed out by factory food and chains. This process was going on at exactly the same time as all the exotic ingredients required to cook as a form of middle class one upmanship were becoming widely available. So the standard of cooking to impress was rising, while the standard of everyday food was falling. That at least is true of Britain in the Sixties. In the two decades preceding, rationing and general shortages produced some truly dreadful food here.

But I'll try later to scan in the truly magnificent snark of her discussion of the pizza's arrival in Britain.

Only slightly tangential...

I garden every year, and will do even more this year. I was pretty interested in this Slate story describing Victory Gardens. I absolutely did not understand the scale of the gardens. A quarter-acre! I watched the contemporary instructional video and was completely aghast. The labor that went into that garden was amazing, but they didn't even mention the post-processing. Every time they walked out of that garden with a couple bushels of food, someone spent another two hours in the kitchen, cleaning, prepping and preserving. I was shocked at the extent of the work that a WWII victory garden required.

The German Loser Gardens took just as much work.

A family member I will not specify here just asked me "wait, you like Italian food? Italian food can be good?" and it has sent me into a dizzying spiral of restaurant-Googling, memories of wandering around Rome, and total delirium imagining a better world. A couple of these local restaurants allow you to send meals to hospital workers, I see...

22: Singapore, Venice, Marseille, New Orleans, Napoli, London, New York, Tokyo?

Also Paris has the motto "fluctuat nec mergitur" and its coat of arms is three ships...

Further on 22, you've got to say that inventing the most common restaurant meal in the world is a substantial contribution to food culture? Whether you like it or not, the hamburger is quite a culinary invention.

Aberdeen gave the world the deep fried Mars bar. The greasy Glasgow pie is actually quite good. Amsterdam ... Long pause ... The hash brownie? Ummm.

It's quite fun to think of port cities that have contributed absolutely nothing to world cuisine.

Any advance on Gothenburg? Do I hear Helsinki bid?

Belfast? Southampton? Any advance on Southampton? Going... Going... Gone - to the lady in the chair across the room for the record breaking bid of Southampton.

I'll remind you all that Albion's Seed discusses four regional British cuisines. Whole cloth?

Izaak Walton quoted an older verse:

Hops and Turkies, Carps and Beer
Came into England all in a year

Original (?) version: Chronicle Henry VIII 66 About [1524]..it happened that divers things were newly brought into England, whereupon this Rime was made: 'Turke[y]s, Carps, Hoppes, Piccarell [young pike], and Beere, Came into England all in one yeere

There's a version of the same verse in a Kipling children's story - I don't remember which one, but one of the Puck of Pook's Hill stories. "Turkeys, Heresy, Hops and Beer Came into England all in one year." I don't know precisely what the heresy is, obviously something to do with the Reformation but not the specific event being named.

Book of Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 9 to 21:

And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats ...

To quibble further with part-read OP, I think lasting innovations are less likely to come from housewives than from line cooks in mid-range restaurants (see British-Bengali whatever GY is talking about). Urbanization produces more such restaurants, suburbanization fewer. I think suburbanization is mostly a historical blip and the next century or so will produce a phenomenal wave of good stuff. (Or the 21st Century Collapse. Future, binary. I think not-collapse.)

And one more factoid: AIUI wet rice only became a staple in most SE Asia quite recently, 18th-19th centuries. And IIRC there've been two waves of change inside the rice period, adoption of short-grain (?) cultivars for taste (late 19th?) then fast-growing Green Revolution cultivars from the later 1960s.* Which no-one liked because they tasted bad or had too much or too little gluten or something. So the older cultivars remained as newly luxurious alternatives. And the major protein fat and flavor source in (at least some of) this rice cuisine was fish sauce. If any fish remain available in SEA by the end of this century they'll be a very different set of fish.
*All of which got eaten by a pest outbreak over the 70s (?), and were replaced by yet another high-growth pest-resistant cultivar.
(Actually several factoids.)

"wet rice"?

As in paddies?

I don't know how to grow it, but to cook it you use water, salt, and butter.

52: Yes.

All of the home cooking is probably improving my health, but what I really want is like three days of nothing but Chipotle food.

That's ricist.

And not the health brown rice. I want the good rice.

56 to 57.

55: The thinking is what, we're in a pandemic, might as well feast on the food chain with five foodborne illness outbreaks in the last few years?

On a per meal basis, that's got to be better than I do.

I can't find brown rice anywhere and it's a problem.

Also, 56 is very racist against Australians.

Have you tried Chipotle?

Can you just mix white rice and rice bran?

The Walton "carp" thing has got to be wrong. Carp ponds were a feature of mediaeval monasteries and pickerel of course are native all over northern Europe. before they turn into pike.

Rabbits were I think introduced here by the Romans.

It's possible he's referring to ways of cooking both carp and pike, though.

Do you guys eat pike in Montana or Utah?

John Stowe, Annales of England:

Carpes, and Pippins, as master Leonard Mascall affirmeth, were brought into Englande by Master Mascall of Plomsted in Sussex and since that time came in Apricoks, and many other delicate fruites. Turkies, which all other nations call Guyney cockes, are generally saide to bee brought into England beetweene the tenth, and fifteenth yeere of Henry the eight: and about the same time came in the planting of Hoppes, brought from Artois, and presently vppon that, and for many yeeres after was vsed this Rime:

Turkey, Carpes, Hops: Piccarels, and beere,
Came into England: all in one yeere

The sober nineteenth century is less convinced:

Fuller asserts that [Leonard Mascall] introduced pippin apples and carp from over the sea, but he certainly was not the first to bring this fish to our lakes and ponds, although he may have imported some from the Danube and bred them in the moat at Plumpton Place.... He refers to the carp as follows: "The carpe is a strange and daintie fish to take. The first bringer of them into England was Maister Mascoll, of Plumstead, in Sussex, who also brought the planting of the pippin into England." This probably refers to one of his ancestors, and the word Plumstead may be a printer's error.

And all kinds of other stuff. Like the slaughter of whales in the later Modern apparently made squid populations explode, so probably a bunch of squid dishes invented over that period. And lots of jellyfish in our future.

And I would murder a monk for some Portuguese calamari right now.

The German Loser Gardens took just as much work.

The Germans, like loser cultures everywhere, were obsessed with the idea of the sturdy independent yeoman farmer being the backbone of the nation. What this meant was that German agriculture was made up of lots and lots of small farms, each using a lot of labour. As a result, more German women worked outside the home at the start of the war than British or American women at any point during the war - but, in broad terms, the British and American women were mobilised to work riveting ships and making Merlin engines, while the German women were working on the small family farm to take up the slack from their husbands and sons (and indeed horses) being away on the Eastern Front.

Meanwhile, the US and Britain had large, efficient farms, with a shitload of machinery and very few people working on them. They were the first post-peasant nations in history; Germany (and France and Italy and the USSR) were still, like Assyria and Qin China and Pharaonic Egypt, peasant nations, where the largest part of the population spent their days hitting the soil with a stick to make crops grow on it.

the slaughter of whales in the later Modern apparently made squid populations explode, so probably a bunch of squid dishes invented over that period

I wonder if this is the same kind of squid, though. There has been an explosion in Humboldt squid numbers in the last few decades in the North Pacific, but those are not calamari-type squid. You don't eat Humboldt squid. They eat you. (And each other.)

69: Dunno. But we're talking a couple of centuries, not decades.

And I expect whale populations have been recovering in the N Pac in the last few decades. IEC moratorium 1987 IIRC.

The ancient Romans' idea of Dhal (Pisam Indicam):

Cook peas; when skimmed, put in the saucepan finely chopped leeks and coriander (cilantro) to be cooked with the peas. Take small cuttlefish, most desirable because of the black liquor and cook them also. Add oil, broth and wine, a bunch of leek and green coriander and bring to the boil. Wnen done, crush pepper, lovage, oregano, a little wild cumin; moisten with the liquid from the peas, add wine and raisin wine to taste; mince the fish very fine, stir into the peas, and sprinkle with pepper.

(Apicius, Book V: 187)

One wonders what contemporary Indians would have made of this. I suppose it's not entirely implausible.

you've got to say that inventing the most common restaurant meal in the world is a substantial contribution to food culture?

The hamburger as we know it was probably not invented in Hamburg. And I'm doubtful it's the most common restaurant meal in the world - McDonald's only sells 50 million a day worldwide.

The FREE world, ajay.

Is it even a restaurant if it doesn't have a clown for a mascot?

For these purposes, the Michelin Star Man is an honorary clown.

Tech. Wood v charcoal v gas. Availability and prices change over time. Cheap iron for equipment. Does semiliterate OP guy cover this?

Is it even a restaurant if it doesn't have a clown for a mascot?

That's not a very nice way to talk about Marco Pierre White.

For these purposes, the Michelin Star Man is an honorary clown.

Actually a mascot of this restaurant.

||
Foolishly, I forgot to fill the ice tray.
|>

The UK produced no Michelin 3-stars before 1994?

81. Le Gavroche got a third star in 1982, but lost it on a technicality in 1993 (Chef patron changed from father to son). The Waterside Inn at Bray (another member of the Roux clan) has had 3 stars since 1985.

No 3-star chefs, I should say. Anyway it's little less surprising for 1982.

Do you guys eat pike in Montana or Utah?

I never really get the opportunity as I've never sought it out. The streams I'm fishing most often here are cold and rocky, trout only. They've got them in a bunch of local lakes though. Maybe I'll have to look into a little fishing boat.

The place I want to try it in NW MT is the Stillwater river a few minutes west of Whitefish. I've heard it's monster pike fishing with fish in the 20-30 pound range not uncommon.

One of those things on a fly rod and I would renounce my horror of pike fishing entirely. But after the summer I spent eating the bloody things every week, with boiled potatoes, I would be reasonably happy never to catch one again.

Tech! Salted fish, Medieval Fish Horizon, massive change. Then refrigeration, not salted.

73: Has to be a ton more noodle soup eaten than hamburgers, even if you are only looking at fast food restaurants let alone "most common meal".

I'm thinking naan bread may have the edge, depending on where exactly the borders of "naan" and "meal" are.

69: people definitely eat humbolt squid, but I have no idea of the overall numbers. It's commercially significant in south america, but not US yet I think.

It's all the same once you cut it into rings and bread it.

Monster.

Actually, we used to make stuffed squid every Christmas Eve. It was great, at least the stuffing was.

90: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/calamari-made-of-pig-rectum-the-this-american-life-rumor-isnt-true-but-its-fascinating.html

89: good lord. Glad someone is.

Someone could check the enormous corpus of manuscript cookbooks for innovations.

I was not patient enough to read the linked article -- does the author address the difference between the home cook in a nuclear family and the home cook being a professional? For a lot of the 300 years between the Columbian Exchange and the TV dinner, most families with enough money to have any choice in what to eat had servants, and the more money the more likely the cook was a lifetime professional cook. With a particular family to amuse, and a receipt book to take with her if she needs a new job. Innovation ahoy!

re: 95

I got asked once to take a look at machine processing digitsed manuscript cookbooks, and printed cookbooks, to tag them and make them searchable. But it wasn't a project that ended up having any money attached to it. It would be a cool project to have done, though.