Historical Origins of Some Common Foods

Before you take a sip of beer or wine along with a nibble of bread and cheese, consider that these ubiquitous culinary staples are not the ingenious product of
some Magic Chef of Olde, but were discovered quite by accident! Here are some examples of popular foodstuffs that were discovered entirely by chance.

Salted and Smoked Meats: The action of common salt to cure and preserve flesh was probably first casually observed on ocean fish. When ocean fish die
and wash on shore, the salt in the water permeates their tissue, driving out any fresh (non salinated) water, and if bacteria or the gulls don't get to it first,
(as can happen in very dry climates such as that found on the Dead Sea) the remaining tissue will dessicate and dry out. Certainly, early man noticed the
action of salt on fish tissue. When fish were caught for consumption by angling later on, salt was added, perhaps, as a seasoning, and any leftover nibbles and
bits of overlooked or uneaten salted fish would keep, and not rot. One can imagine an early oceanside stone age community discovering, to their great
delight, that dried fish kept for a great period of time when packed in salt, even for many years. Salt deposits are common near ocean fronts in the form of
dried out sub surface sediment in shallow coastal areas, so mining salt was not a problem.

What works on fish tissue, works on other animal tissue as well. Man discovered that the meat of wild boar, wild poultry and deer could be preserved by salting
as well. Keeping in mind there was no refrigeration, this was a monumental discovery, and certainly contributed to the exploding population of early
tribes.

When man discovered that food could be cooked over a wood fire, he instantly stumbled upon smoke preservation. Smoke contains Nitrates and Nitrites that
preserve meat. In addition to imparting a savory aroma and flavor on meat, wood smoke, along with salting, added an extra dose of chemical protection against
harmful, freshness destroying bacteria and fungi, the most notable early examples being smoked (kippered) herring and smoked and salted beef (pastrami),
bacon and ham.

Dairy Products: Every school child is familiar with the tale of butter. Mongolian horsemen would keep goat or mares milk in intestine bags for
consumption on the trail. The agitation of the horses motion would inevitably churn the milk into butter. Whether fact or fable, the wide gamet of popular
dairy products consumed all over the world today were certainly stumbled upon by chance.

Natural stomach or intestine bags were indeed widely used in ancient times as containers for liquids, and at some point man discovered that the milk held in
the stomach of juvenile sheep would separate into curds and whey (a liquid, and a crumbly solid.) This separation was caused by Rennet, an enzyme that
acted on the milk. Rennet, by chance, is naturally present in the lining of sheep stomach.

Once the crumbly curds were isolated and pressed together, the precursor of the todays thousands of cheese varieties was born, all by accident. The flora and
fauna indigenous to different climates resulted in different flavors and textures of cheese. That is why Italian Provolone is so different than Somerset
Cheddar. The bacteria and fungi in the environment of Rome are different than those in the environment of London. Blue Cheese is an excellent example of a
"gourmet" cheese discovered by accident. At some point in time, a cheesemaker stored his finished product in cool underground caves for aging, and a harmless strain of blue Penicillium mold invaded the cheese. One can imagine some intrepid, or simply frugal, cheese monger deciding to taste the blue mold
infected wheels rather than throw them away, discovering with great delight, the sharp, piquant flavor to be most delicious. A very brave man, indeed.

It is of interest that Tofu, the "Cheese of the Orient", was probably stumbled upon as well, when some creative Asian cook decided to add a seaweed called
Nagari to ground up soybean meal and water, only to find that the solids (soy curds) separated out the same way they do with cheese. As the plot
thickens, so to speak, it is now shown that both Nagari and Rennet are coagulants, and serve a similar purpose in both processes.

Alcoholic Beverages: Ethanol is a (lucky?) natural waste product of the metabolic action of yeasts. When yeasts eat sugar and carbohydrates, they
multiply, and produce alcohol and fizzy carbon dioxide gas as a result. Yeast is everywhere. It floats through the air around each of us even at this moment.
Early man quickly discovered leavening, that is the addition of yeast to ground up seed meals like wheat, would cause the dough to "rise" making it fluffier and
more palatable. All one had to do was mix up some batter, and leave it on the doorstep for a few days. the yeast found a home in the batter and did the
rest.

One can easily imagine some distant stone age man or woman who mixed some form of early ground grain or rice in a clay pot or wicker grass basket for use as meal, adding water to make a batter, and then setting it aside for some common archaic emergency or another, and coming back a week later to find it fizzy and reeking of an odd smell, that smell being alcohol. Upon consumption, the lucky consumer would have become lightheaded and giddy, the first recorded inebriation in world history.

Once the process for making alcohol was understood, man's imagination took over. Yeast could be cultured in grape juice, barley mash, corn meal, rice, potatoes, or any source of food for the yeast strain. Just like cheese, different tribes in different demographic areas would brew different beverages, in accordance to what was available to them agriculturally, and by the different strains of yeast present in their locality. Once again, beer brewed in Rome, for that reason, does not taste the same as beer brewed in London.

What about distilled hard liquor?

Yeast can only produce a solution of about 15 percent (30 proof) alcohol before it literally poisons itself with its own waste product. Somewhen in time,
man noticed that a pure form of alcohol could be separated from wine or beer. A jar of covered wine may have been left in the extreme heat of the
Mediterranean sun, the internal vapor pressure would have caused a small amount of pure Ethanol to condense on the underside of the lid, easily detected when opened, or perhaps beer or wine was boiled for cooking, and since alcohol boils off at a lower temperature than the water it is mixed in with, its heady, stinging vapor would have been certainly detected. Not long after that epiphany, some innovative individual figured out that if the
vapor could be cooled and captured, the result would be pure Ethanol. Thus the still was born.

Agriculture: Every single one of the fruits and vegetables we eat today is a highly cultivated, selected and refined variation of some pre existing wild
strain. Wild strains of wheat, gourds, tomatoes, grapes, etc., existed on earth long before man even evolved.

In his ceaseless quest for food, early gatherers stumbled upon these midget,often barely palatable ancestors of the modern produce department, and by selecting the seeds of the largest and heartiest specimens for planting, thus began the process of artificial
selection. It was at this point that the human species began to challenge mother nature. Over tens of thousands of years, these plants were refined and selected more and more, and to this day, via genetic splicing, are still being modified by man in his ceaseless quest to feed himself and his burgeoning billions worldwide, all beginning, fantastically, perfectly by chance.