Ancient Popcorn (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Popcorn (2012)

si.edu

16 pointsglth10 comments

It's funny how old relatively modern foods can be, and how new seemingly traditional dishes are.

Any European dish with tomatoes or potatoes in it is less than 500 years old. Meanwhile French Onion soup hasn't changed much since the Roman era. Kombucha may have been tranding recently, but it dates back thousands of years, meanwhile the relatively simple ciabatta roll was created in the 80's.

It makes you appreciate how good a new food has to be to break into the culinary ouvre. Think about how long croissants and doughnuts have been around (since at least the 13th and 15th centuries), and boom, cronuts pop up out of nowhere in 2013 and seem to have taken the pastry world by storm. 10 years later, doughnuts and croissants are still a staple at every bakery, from fancy shops to fast food places like dunkin' donuts, and while cronuts are still around, they are more of a niche thing, somewhat forgotten. It certainly did not have the staying power of, say, pizza margherita...

The Aztecs had both chocolate and peanut butter. But it took America to put them together.

But seriously, is a cronut just a doughnut-shaped croissant or does it actually bring something completely new to the table?

It's also fried. So it's a lot like a donut, but instead of the cake-y/ risen pastry that donuts normally contain, it's croissant.

What type of cheese did they put in their onion soup during the roman era? Did they have Comté & Gruyère?

Since he didn't reply...apparently Emperor Antoninus Pius "died of indigestion after eating too much Gruyere"

https://www.cheesehouse.com/cheese/gruyere-cheese-a-history-...

> Meanwhile French Onion soup hasn't changed much since the Roman era.

I bet it did. Any historical sources to back that up?

Any source it might have? Wikipedia seems to agree it might [0].

For example, French Toasts have barely changed since the Roman times [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_onion_soup

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkqIMQteDsY

> Wikipedia seems to agree it might [0].

I disagree. Wikipedia says:

> Onion soups have been popular at least since Roman times.[1]

The reference points to https://worldinparis.com/french-onion-soup which just says:

> Onion soups have been popular at least since Roman times.

without references, so the historical references are just 'trust me, bro'.

And it's also a confusing handwavy statement. What does it mean? Were the Gauls cooking onion soups or the Romans? Were they cooking it in the geographical region matching today's France? Or was it brought from Rome?

These types of statements are triggering my pseudohistorical nationalism bullshit detector.

Sliced bread is from 1928 which is nuts to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliced_bread

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