Every PlateTales food history story tagged Fermentation, newest first.
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Korea first wrote about the chili in 1614 and called it poisonous. Chili kimchi took another century and a half to fill the cookbooks, and red napa-cabbage kimchi is younger still.
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.
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but milk-fat residue on pottery from Poland puts cheesemaking at about 5500 BCE. Here is what the evidence shows, and what the legends add.
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.
Sushi began as fish packed in rice to keep it for months, and the rice was thrown away. Vinegar and Edo street stalls turned it into the nigiri we know.
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