Baking bread with the Romans part III – the panis quadratus strikes back (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Baking bread with the Romans part III – the panis quadratus strikes back (2018)

tavolamediterranea.com

I think I have also inadvertently recreated the "carbonized panis quadratus" in my home oven recently.

Side note: pretty paranoid website owner to have disabled all text selection/copying functions (or overlaid it with a transparent object)...

Like most DRM, it inconveniences good-faith users and doesn't stop even casual attempts at theft. Just print the page to a PDF and all text is selectable/copyable.

Reader mode of safari disables such bull

Looking at the images of the originals, the indentations do not seem as evenly spaced as one would expect if they used the "wheel". To me it looks like a simple stick, used 4 times, would be more appropriate for the job (and in line with the bread name). Just guessing though.

A lot of the fossilized loaves presented aren't even round - some of them don't even have 8 indentations!

I really don't like the wagon wheel theory.

I love all history of bread making, I find it super interesting i wasn general the discover of foods we take for granted.

Protip: make your own ketchup sometime..hot dang it's easily to see why it became ubiquitous..and then cry over how terrible the mass produced stuff is ;)

> make your own ketchup sometime

Any recipe you prefer?

Also, fun fact, tomatoes are a new world plant. So, no ketchup in the EU until after trade between America and Europe was established.

Weird that you said 'the EU' rather than 'Europe'. But since you did I'll point out that there are several EU territories in America that would have had ketchup to begin with.

Mostly laziness... Should have said 'Europe' or 'Afro-Eurasia' instead.

.. and much more seriously: no red sauce in Italian foods.

Tomatoes crossed the Atlantic during the Spanish conquest, so the Italians had several hundred years to adapt to tomatoes.

Ketchup really just means a fruit based sauce, so it long preceded the arrival of the tomato.

> Ketchup really just means a fruit based sauce

No, it doesn't.

> so it long preceded the arrival of the tomato.

It did, but ketchups before tomato weren't necessarily fruit based. The original British version (and thus, the first American version, from which the other pre-tomato version derived) was mushroom based. Fruit, nut, egg, and bivalve-based versions all existed. (And the historical origin is in Asian fermented fish and soy sauces.)

Is it Asian? I'd assumed—with no real support whatsoever—that it was descended from Roman garum, a fermented fish sauce that's a lot closer.

Looking it up again (was relying on memory before), it was apparently specifically Indonesian kecaps that inspired both the sauce and it's name.

You rock mate, thank you

It's a weird quirk of history. Garum was forgotten for centuries, then the same basic concept reintroduced much later from Asia.

It still wasn't used quite the way garum was, but it did give rise to things like Worcestershire sauce, and various ketchups (fermented vegetable pastes). Tomato ketchup came much later, and it wasn't until Heinz perfected it that it reached the form that's ubiquitous now.

I have to frickin try this now!! Dude thank you for the knowledge drop, I had no idea it first started as mushroom based.

> Ketchup really just means a fruit based sauce

That's not true. Ketchup is believed to have come "ultimately from Chinese via Malay kicap, from Min Nan 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish broth”), though precise path is unclear – there are related words in various Chinese dialects, and it may have entered English directly from Chinese. Cognate to Indonesian kecap, ketjap (“soy sauce”). Various other theories exist – see Ketchup: Etymology for extended discussion." [1]

This etymology places the origin of ketchup closer to "fish sauce", pickled cabbage with meat, or conceptually even yogurt or bread!

> so it long preceded the arrival of the tomato.

Yes, but it has nothing to do with fruits, unless you are fermenting them to get rid of bad-bacteria and maybe increase shelf-life.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup

After reading the further Wikipedia entry on the etymology of the term, it feels like it should be stressed more strongly that the etymology you quoted is not necessarily the strongest contender, but just one of a few that may or may not be correct.

Would you be specific as to what etymology you mean? I linked the extended discussion above.

The Wiktionary page I linked to, as well as many other etymological pages on the web say what I did above. There are many things that could be true, but they do not all have the same likelihood.

Even NPR [1] and the history channel [2] have pages on the etymology of ketchup.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/02/248195661...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/ketchup-surprising-ancient-hist...

The wiktionary link earlier says to visit this for an extended discussion which provides a few more possible origins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup#Etymology

Yes. That wiktionary link and text was posted by me in my comment.

My question was to name specifically which etymology on a secondary page is more likely than the one listed at the main entry and on almost all etymology websites? The burden of proof is on the person who wrote, "it feels like it should be stressed more strongly that the etymology you quoted is not necessarily the strongest contender".

Words mean what the listener understands. Most people understand ketchup to mean “tomato ketchup” so the person you’re replying to is correct.

I thought ketchup was originally mushroom based.

Sorry for the late reply, Jamie Oliver's Jamie at home cookbook is the one I use for ketchup (and I do BBQ chicken his way now)

I'm a huge fun of the guy as he made the approach easy on cooking.

Ketchup was actually originally a fish sauce from Asia. Then it slowly became a mushroom based sauce in Europe.

Finally, tomato based ketchup became dominant, yes. But the lineage of ketchup in Europe (of course, it is even older in East and Southeastern Asia) goes way before the Columbian exchange,

Also apparently banana ketchup is common in the Philippines

Photos don’t load on mobile :/

Totally off topic but given the headline I can’t not post this

https://youtu.be/HrcbCW4y9Dw

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