12.20.2007

Food History

The last post made me think about food, so I decided to poke around the Food Timeline site. Dear Reader(s?), I recommend you do the same. It's fun.

Some tidbits...
  • The punishment for shortchanging customers on beer in 2100 BC was death by drowning in the Code of Hammurabi.
  • Chickens have been domesticated since 3200 BC.
  • Rice pudding was thought of as medicine in the first century.
  • I can most likely thank 9th Century Arabian law prohibiting wine for my morning coffee.
  • The debate over who invented the hot dog can be quite heated.
  • Instead of Raisinets, I would have had hazelnuts in Elizabethan England.
  • It's French Onion soup because of the bouillon crafted in 17th-Century France.
  • While the crystallization process was created by a German apothecary in 1747, I can probably thank Napoleon for the sugar beet industry that gives my college town that awful smell!
  • This site is the only other place besides the Library of Congress Subject Headings list that I have seen the word cookery. Good thing we can search modern library catalogs by keyword these days.

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