Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship’s hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at some level impossible. Certainly, we can make some educated guesses. In the case of late medieval cooking, one scholar has looked at the transformations of recipes as they crossed cultural zones (such as the medieval Arabic sweet porridge called ma’muniya, which evolved into Anglo-Norman maumenee) and concluded that “as time went by, a dish tended to become sweeter, spicer, and more complicated.” But so much has changed between the worlds of the past and the present when it comes to cultivars, modes of preparation and preservation, and, perhaps, an overall sense of what tastes good and bad. I often wonder what someone from the thirteenth or seventeenth century might make of a Snickers bar, for instance. I suspect they’d find it disgustingly cloying. But then again, maybe not.
Thinking about historical tastes reminds me of the French expression for words that seem to be analogous across two languages, but actually have totally different meanings: faux amis. (For instance, English-speakers in Spanish-speaking countries often say that they are embarazada—they intend to say they’re ’embarrassed,’ but they’re actually saying they’re ‘pregnant.’)
These early modern foods are culinary false friends. They seem like they’d be the same as our familiar correlates. But we can’t be sure that they tasted the same.
Like so much in history, they’re so close, yet just out of reach. {read}