Every PlateTales food history story tagged Ancient, newest first.
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Almost every ancient Roman recipe we have comes from one late cookbook, Apicius. It is a book of honey, pepper and fish sauce, and it was not written by the man whose name it carries.
The Forme of Cury, written about 1390, holds 196 recipes from a king's cooks. Read closely, they undo several popular ideas about what medieval Europe ate.
Black pepper began on India's Malabar Coast and crossed the sea to Egypt, Rome and Venice. Here is what the records say about its trade, its prices and the voyages it inspired.
The oldest bread found so far was baked by hunter-gatherers about 14,400 years ago, thousands of years before farming. From there it runs through Egyptian ovens, Roman handouts and a Missouri bakery.
Egypt was importing cinnamon by about 2000 BC, Rome paid fortunes for it, and the Portuguese, Dutch and British took turns controlling the island that grew it.
The oldest dumplings ever found came out of a dry tomb in Turpan, dated to about 499 to 640 AD. From there the trail runs to Turkic manti, Italian ravioli, Polish pierogi and Siberian pelmeni.
Nobody knows when the first injera was cooked, but the grain behind it was farmed in the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands by about 1600 BCE. Here is what the evidence shows.
The oldest chemical trace of a fermented drink sits in 9,000-year-old jars from a Chinese village. Here is what the evidence shows, from garum to kimchi to Pasteur.
Ice cream has no single inventor. Marco Polo and Catherine de Medici never carried it anywhere, and the documents point to French, English and American hands.
Asian rice was first grown in China's Yangtze basin, and a second species came from the Niger delta. Here is how both reached Carolina, Italy and the age of miracle rice.
The tortilla is ancient, but the taco is younger than its legend. Where the word came from, who first printed it, and how Glen Bell's crunchy shell reached 1962 Downey.
The word pizza is on paper in Gaeta in 997, but the tomato pie came centuries later in Naples. The famous Margherita story of 1889 is the weakest link.
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