[Sca-cooks] Food in 1632? sorta OP/OT

[Susan Fox-Davis]

I love culinary speculative fiction!  Are we inventing a new literary 
genre here?

>>Olaf> Recently one of the writers wrote a very good story about food-but
>>
>had the
>
>>German peasants complaining about how much meat the uptime hostess wasted
>>
>on
>
>>each meal & that the food was too spicy (spaghetti & chili).
>>
>Serena: 
>Greetings,
>
>Specific to the items you have mentioned there are some problems. Unless all
>of the food staples were sent back in time with them they would not have had
>avialable to them the following ingredients common to these foods:
>Chili:
>Chili powder commonly contains ground dried chiles, it also includes cumin,
>oregano, cloves, coriander, pepper, and salt. They would not have had access
>to the chili's
>No Tomatos
>
This is 1632 not 1492.  They could have gotten tomatoes and peppers. 
 For that matter, if they were careful they could probably have grown 
some from seeds in the tomatoes and bell peppers in their refrigerators 
when the time travel thing happened.  Since Grantville is West Virginia 
and not California I would not count on their having fresh chili peppers 
in the grocery store on a regular basis but I wouldn't count them out 
entirely.  Dried chilis might have viable seeds, but canned ones really 
would not, being cooked.

I bet that Rebecca and their other temporally-native friends probably 
had some interesting culinary influences in the other direction, 
particulary at Pesach time.

>Ground beef as we know it probably would not have been available (someone
>else might have better insight on that.)
>
Again, why not?  Germany is the home of great sausages, minced meats of 
all kinds were on the menu.

I need to think more of this through.  The next book in the series, RING 
OF FIRE comes out next month.
<http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200401/074347175X__c_.htm>

Selene Colfox