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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it interesting how native American foods (tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, chilis, corn, strawberry, pineapple, etc.) have been integrated into "traditional" cuisines around the world. Italian spaghetti sauce or Thai peanut sauce, etc. have only been available for a few hundred years max... Still a lot, but some other traditions go back millennia.

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Yes this is why I always find it funny when people worry about if a dish is "authentic". To what time period? It seems most peoples concept of authentic is what people were eating in the late 19th/early 20th century. Not long before that, peasants were eating gruel.

A lot of really old recipes, say, those dating to the roman era or even only the renaissance, are very unpalatable for modern tastes.

Do you know of any good repository of (as far as we know) accurate recipes from that sort of time? I'd love to be able to cook a Roman dinner one night or something.

Here's a video series of foods from the 1700s - which is a few hundred years after what you're talking about, but still interesting: [Jas. Townsend](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw)

The Apicius Cookbook

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

(Pdf) http://kitchenproject.com/history/apicius/Apicius.pdf

Having spent very little time in the Roman Empire I can't vouch for its authenticity, but http://www.passthegarum.co.uk/ looks like an interesting source of recipes.

Indeed. And it goes both ways, of course. There are, for instance, many (delicious) traditional Mexican dishes that would have been impossible prior to contact from Europeans.

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