SC - Good Broth

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Ras wrote:
>IMO, yes. Many new world foods were introduced to the rest of Europe
through
>Italy including tomatoes, possibly capsicums, and a myriad of 'squash'
types.


I was just reading this rather interesting passage in The Oxford Companion
to Food:

"The generally accepted view has been that Columbus discovered maize in the
New World in 1492 and brought it back to Spain, whence it was taken with
great rapidity to other parts of Europe, to Africa, and through the Middle
East and India to China. Proponents of this view acknowledge as a difficulty
that the earliest recorded references to maize in Europe give it names such
as "gran turco", but suggest that this was mere confusion, of the same sort
which resulted in an American bird receiving the name "turkey"."

"An alternative schol of thought holds that maize must have arrived in Asia,
Africa and Europe before 1492. The early names which it had in these three
continents are cited as evidence that the plant had a Middle Eastern
(Balkan, Turkish, Arabic) centre of distribution in the Old World, and the
already strong argument from nomenclature is fortified by accounts of early
travellers in Africa and elsewhere (all this being set out, with a multitude
of references, by Jeffreys, 1975) and by pointing to the inherent
improbability that a plant which first reached Spain in 1492 could have been
undir cultivation in the E. Indies in 1496 and in China by 1516. (Also,
there seems to be archaeological evidence of its having reached Papua New
Guinea (via Polynesia) 1,000 years ago. Once there, it could have travelled
westwards through SE Asia and S. Asia, and then have been carried by Arabs
to Africa.)"

"The controversy, for those who admit there is one, is alluring, not least
because acceptance of the second hypothesis would imply that other New World
plants could have reached the Old World in pre-Columbian times."

Jeffreys refers to M. D. W. Jeffreys: "Pre-Columbian Maize in the Old
World", in Margaret L. Arnott (ed.): Gastronomy.

Nanna

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