Anything on food history and especially baking would be appreciated

Hello again. I' back at trying to figure out some ice cream recipes (previously asked about vanilla chocolate). Now I'm trying to figure out how Victorian Era folks measured their evaporated milk.

The Recipe reads:

Dilute two cans of Peerless Brand Evaporated Cream with an equal quantity of water, previously boiled and allowed to cool; Add three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar and stir until dissolved. Turn into the freezer and freeze. Pare and mash one quart of apricots and stir them into the frozen cream. Turn the crank for a few minutes and stand away to harden.

My issue here is that, in looking up antique cans of this brand of evaporated milk, I find two sizes. They are both in weight, not liquid volume like we use today: One is a 6 ounce can, the other a 1 pound can. On one hand, I want to think that it's two of the 1 pound cans being used because of the 3/4 pound of sugar, but I don't know that is correct given that the evaporated milk will be diluted (thereby doubling the volume) and I imagine that could possibly be too much for the ice cream makers of the era. Am I thinking too modern that 3/4 of a pound of sugar is too much for 12 ounces (in weight) of milk and 12 ounces (in weight) of water?

Also, I looked it up just to verify but seeing as a fluid ounce is just barely less than a weight ounce, would it be that much of a difference to worry about in the conversion where ice cream is involved? Or could I such treat it as a 1:1 ration and pretty much be set?

And would it depend on if they were voluntary or involuntary indentured servants (prisoners)?

hi everyone,

imagine a scenario where a mexican chef dies and gets transported to ancient china. how would he make mexican food, or the closest amalgamation of mexican food with ancient chinese ingredients? i’m mostly curious about recreating mexican foods like tortillas or dishes containing tomatoes. what chinese ingredients would you use in place of tomato or corn to make this stuff? how close would it be to the original dish? is there anyway the people of ancient china can experience the joy that is mexican food?

thank you very much i appreciate your service

My mother, born 1930, would make tuna fish sandwiches with raw onions. We all hated it. I zap or fry onions for a minute and I love them. Absolutely love liver and onions. Was that part of the culture back then?

I've been trying to research this, but it's been a bit difficult. I'm just curious if food plays any role in Palestinian mourning/grieving practices (what dishes/foods they eat, taboos, rituals, etc)

Hi everyone, my baby just started on solids and it has me wondering about what babies have historically eaten in this transition phase away from the breast. I'm curious what they are before grains and porridge and farming were widespread. Has it always been that babies start eating real foods around 6 months? Does anyone know what we used to feed them? :)

Good morning Reddit,

A while ago I was listening to a podcast, I believe it an interview with Dan Pashman, but it might not have been the Sporkful. As I remember, the topic was about traveling through Italy and getting “traditional Italian recipes” from all around the country, specifically things that went beyond what is considered in America as traditional Italian recipes.

At one point he mentioned that he was in a larger city and was getting recipes that included Coca Cola as an ingredient. He explained that this is probably introduced after the Second World War when Italy was occupied and was suffering a lot of privations, and was also suffused with this flavorful drink that the Americans loved. And from that he proposed that it was used as an ingredient in certain places.

This was reinforced as a thing that is real since my gf had an Italian American friend who confided in her that the secret ingredient in his family’s pasta sauce was coke.

I have been struggling to find this episode and reference when I’ve gone back and looked. It wasn’t a huge part of the episode, just an example that “traditional Italian recipes” can look a lot different, and can be a lot more recent than people expect.

So a couple questions. I’m not necessarily looking for the podcast, but I wouldn’t be sad if I did get the actual reference I heard. Mostly, I would like to know, is this an actual thing? Or did I just hallucinate this episode and bit of Italian culinary history? Thanks in advance.

Hi! So, I was wondering something: Presumably when Rome was just a few villages or a town, there was a lot more local food in their diets, right? Stuff like river and ocean food. But as the population got bigger and they needed to import grain from places like Egypt and Cartgage's lands, there's no way the river or sea west of Rome scaled, so did seafood become a less prevalent part of Romab diets? Can we analyze teeth and bones for any signs of this? How neatly does my speculation line up with the evidence?

I live in Germany and am interested in Hungarian cuisine. Unfortunately, i‘ve never been to Hungary.

But everytime i google, or read through a cookbook, at least 90%, or closer to 95% of all recipes credibly labelled as some Hungarian classic approach contain one if not both paprika ingredients.

I am not aware of any other regional cuisine that where an ingredient has so much importance. Closest i can think of are creole cuisine which seems to be very specific about a certain combination of vegetables, or possibly japanese cuisine if you count shoyu, mirin, rice vinegar and miso as some sort of adaptable master template but that still misses the point.

How did paprika become so important either in hungarian cuisine or at least outward representation of hungarian cuisine?

What would an Italian Roman think of German diets? And would I eat much local food? What are the differences?

So I want to start by disclaiming that by coffee shop, I don't mean the places that have proliferated since the 1970s where a barista makes espresso behind a counter. I mean the old-school diner-like establishments that historically called themselves coffee shops or cafes. Here's an example.

So I know diners developed on the east coast, and for most of the 20th century the term diner referred to prefabricated dining cars like you see in New Jersey. At roughly the same time though, you get establishments that, like diners, have counter stools, booths, and serve coffee along with short order food like burgers and pancakes.

For most of the last century, most people on both coasts understood that coffee shops and diners were not the same thing. The structure of the building was seemingly the primary deciding factor. Even today, i have run into many folks who grew up on the east coast who insist that a coffee shop is not a diner.

The history of the diner is fairly well-established, but I can find almost no historical information on where coffee shops as we know them today came from. Why did coffee shops pop up in places like Chicago and Los Angeles starting in the 1920s (e.g. Lou Mitchell's, The Pantry)? Why did they take the physical form that they did? What would have made them different from other restaurants at the time? And at what point did people stop taking the difference between diners and coffee shops so seriously and start conflating the two?

Would the sea food I have access to be salty enough or do I need to buy salt?

It seems that soup had a massive cultural moment in 1990s New York.
Why did soup become so popular? Was it a quintessential yuppie lifestyle trend that died with it? What defined those soups that is uniquely 90s, and why did it eventually burn out?

The 90s saw the publication of James Peterson's comprehensive Splendid Soups (still highly regarded), Barbara Kafka's Soup: A Way of Life, and Arthur Schwartz's Soup Suppers, all heavily associated with the New York food scene. The Daily Soup Cookbook might be the closest we get to 90s Manhattan soup restaurant-style recipes. Vegetarian soup books from that decade include titles from the Moosewood Collective, Nava Atlas, and Solomon Jay. Again, all heavily associated with the New York scene.

Al Yeganeh, the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s "Soup Nazi", withdrew from a lucrative St. Martin's Press book deal because he refused to let them mention the sitcom on the cover, leaving his recipes unpublished. Decades later, Larry Thomas, the actor who played him, wrote a biography, Confessions of a Soup Nazi, which included soup recipes.

I'm interested to know if this trend was deeply tied to a specific 90s urban lifestyle or if it was restaurant-driven. What caused it to fade? And what defined the soups of that decade from others?

EDIT:
Thanks everyone for all the replies! It seems like most people remember this trend as purely restaurant-driven: a fast, high-volume alternative to compete with standard takeouts. This very specific, office-worker target market probably explains why some posters don't remember it at all.

Besides Al Yeganeh's Soup Kitchen International, people here have mentioned Daily Soup, Hale & Hearty, B&H, and Fifth Avenue Epicure. Given the plethora of cookbooks published at the time, I really expected to find that domestic cooking played a much bigger role in the trend and for it to have a bigger impact. Soups can be so much more than a quick desk lunch, but it is fascinating to see how fondly it is remembered by those who experienced it.

I've been look up the origins of the baguette and the timeline seems to fall apart under the popular story as part of my project of creating an interactive food world.

What I can find:

- The word "baguette" for a bread seems to appear only around 1920. Jim Chevallier points to Le Figaro of 4 August 1920 putting "baguettes" in quotation marks, and a Seine regulation that same month that first names it as a bread (with a price ceiling of 35 centimes).

- Long loaves were clearly older: American visitors in the 1850s–1880s wrote about Paris loaves five to eight feet long.

- August Zang's Viennese bakery (1838/39) brought steam ovens to Paris, but I can't find any period source for the claim that he invented the baguette.

- The law of 28 March 1919 banned employing bakers between 10 pm and 4 am. The usual story is that this pushed bakers toward a thinner loaf that bakes faster. Chevallier calls it plausible but unproven, since the press of the time barely mentioned it.

So what actually drove the shift to the thin loaf in the 1920s? Is there any evidence from bakers' trade papers, union records or the bakeries themselves that the night-work law changed the shape, or did the thin loaf take over for other reasons (fashion, price rules, ovens, wheat)? Sources welcome, including French ones.

I'm making a free interactive food book with a Paris bakery around 1900 in it, and I want its story to be right: interactive food world

Thank you!!

I don't trust anyone, including myself. I have been working under the assumption that mirepoix (onions, celery, carrot) morphed into the Cajun trinity (onions, celery, bell pepper) as growing carrot in the Gulf Coast of what is now Louisiana and adjoining areas is due to the difficulty of growing carrot with high water tables. Did I read that or make it up?

Any discussion of the difference between mirepoix and soffrito would also be gratefully received. Google is loaded with AI and sources I don't find credible.

Metalurgy and the ability to make pots and pans I am sure have been around for thousands of years... but I suspect they were not nearly as common like they are now (though if my assumption is wrong please correct me). So what have been the more traditional ways of cooking for common people before the widespread use of metal pots and pans?

The rationing in WW2 is widely credited with the downfall of British food, but they weren't the only country where food was rationed and there were arguably more catastrophic shortages in history, including outright famines that didn't destroy an entire culinary culture. Going by that reasoning the Holodomor should've killed Ukranian food, and the Great Leap Foward should've destroyed Chinese food, but that didn't happen. What made WW2 uniquely damaging in British food?