PhD Program in Historical studies
Old and new foods
In addition to wheat, other products characterized, albeit to a lesser extent, the diet of European populations in the Baroque period. The potato, imported from America, for a long time was a food intended only for animal feed, and only in the nineteenth century did it become a basic ingredient of European cuisine. Rice, known since the Middle Ages, was produced in large quantities in the Po Valley from the end of the fifteenth century, while the next century saw the introduction of buckwheat from the north-east of Europe, and maize. Buckwheat, consumed in the form of porridge, pancakes or polenta could not be used to make bread, but had the advantage of growing even on very poor soil and could be mixed with other types of cereal in three-year rotations. Corn was imported to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and was soon adopted in the Old Continent, especially in the Mediterranean area. Indeed, it was cultivated in Castile, Andalusia, Catalonia, Portugal, southern France and northern Italy, as well as in the Balkan Peninsula. The great productivity of corn forced many landowners to increase the extent of the areas for its cultivation in the eighteenth century, thus causing the spread epidemics of pellagra: the lack of vitamin PP in corn was in fact the origin of this deadly disease that ravaged Europe several times until the twentieth century.
As in the case of the potato, the tomato, imported from America became a staple on European tables only from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chili fared better, enjoying immediate success both in Spain and in southern Italy, and the particular type of bird that Hernán Cortés discovered in Mexico in the 1520s and immediately brought to Europe. The turkey, or “Indian chicken”, immediately and permanently made its way to the tables of European high society, which appreciated both the taste of its meat and the price at which it was sold which was cheaper than other large birds widely used in the period, such as swans, peacocks, cormorants, cranes, storks or herons. Other key elements in the food of European populations were the eggplant (already imported from Asia during the Middle Ages by the Arabs) and the bean while they were long associated with the poorer sections of the population as were turnips, chestnuts and potatoes. If the consumption and import of pepper experienced a sharp decline during the Early Modern era, however, some beverages imported from the Americas and the Orient became very popular. In Spain and in the Italian territories dominated by it chocolate in particular, (discovered in Mexico by the Spaniards, and soon sweetened by them, instead of being flavored with hot spices as the indigenous peoples used to do) was very successful as well as coffee (which was introduced to Europe by the Turks from Ethiopia and Yemen, Italians being its first enthusiastic customers between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century). In northern Europe, particularly in England, tea instead became standard, the diffusion of which, together with that of chocolate and coffee, led to a marked increase in both the production and consumption of sugar, and the creation of large plantations of sugar in the territories colonized by Europeans (especially in Brazil). Many black slaves, kidnapped in Africa, formed the workforce needed to meet the demand for sugar from Europe. (image: Pieter Claesz, Banchetto con frutta ostriche e pasticcio di tacchino).