Food on the move: how cooking travels, changes and invents itself

Old engraving of a tomato plant with its deeply cut leaves, its flowers and its round fruits. — The tomato, named “Poma aurea”, in the Kreutterbuch, the plant book by Pietro Andrea Mattioli printed in 1590: according to its catalogue record, the first image of the tomato in Europe. Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500-1577), Public domain, source

Among familiar cuisines, the most “traditional” one is quite likely to be less than five centuries old.

What travels

The cuisine of Sichuan, in China, is reputed to be the spiciest in the world. It burns the mouth, and seems always to have done so.

Yet the chilli pepper comes from the Americas. It did not leave that continent until after 1492.

Its arrival in China can be followed almost year by year. It was first mentioned in 1591, by a playwright, Gao Lian, who used it as a decorative plant and was not much excited about it as a condiment or a medicine.¹

It entered the kitchen much later, and not by way of the big cities. There, refined cuisine judged it too violent, too rustic. It was in the inland provinces, cold, damp and poor, that it was adopted: in Hunan around 1684, in Sichuan around 1749.

One reason among others: salt was expensive there, because the Chinese state held a monopoly on it and taxed it. A condiment that you grow in your garden replaces a condiment that you have to buy.²

Sichuan cuisine as we know it is therefore less than three centuries old.

And at home, exactly the same

The same goes for a plate of pasta with tomato sauce.

The tomato, too, comes from the Americas. It reached Europe in the sixteenth century (the years 1500 to 1599) and, for a long time, people distrusted it: it resembled poisonous plants. It was grown mostly as a curiosity; a few people already ate it, fried like aubergine.³

The first surviving recipe for tomato sauce dates from 1692. It was written in Naples by one Antonio Latini, and it accompanied boiled meat. Not pasta.⁴

It would take another century for someone to think of pouring this sauce over pasta.⁵

One detail deserves to be savoured. Latini was the steward of the prime minister of the Spanish viceroy of Naples. His recipe is called “tomato sauce in the Spanish style”.

The potato followed the same path. It too came from the Americas, and for a long time it was suspected of causing leprosy. It is often said that in 1748 the Parlement of Paris banned its cultivation — but the texts that say so do not cite the decree itself, and it is better to treat it as uncertain.⁶

The experiment is easy to carry out, and instructive. A search for this date brings it up in many texts, often with leprosy as the reason. It remains to be seen whether any of them cites the decree itself.⁷

A detail that everyone repeats and no one documents: that is exactly the signal that should raise the alarm.

Three invented origins, and datable ones

A cuisine readily gives itself an origin. Sometimes the day on which that origin was manufactured can be dated.

“Marco Polo brought pasta back from China.” The story was born in the late 1920s, in a trade journal of American pasta manufacturers. It recounts, in the manner of fiction, that one of Marco Polo’s sailors — named Spaghetti — saw a young woman making noodles. About ten years later, a film took up the scene.⁸

Yet pasta was already being eaten in Sicily. In 1154, a geographer described, near Palermo, a factory producing dried pasta exported to much of the Mediterranean. Marco Polo returned from China in 1295, a hundred and forty years later.⁹

“The Margherita pizza was created in 1889 for the queen.” All the evidence rests on a letter of thanks hanging on the wall of a pizzeria in Naples. A historian has examined it in three steps.¹⁰

Read it. It says only that the three kinds of pizza prepared were found delicious. Not a word about the tomato, the mozzarella, the basil, the flag, or the name Margherita. Even if genuine, it would not prove the story.

Compare it. The seal matches none of the official seals of the time — and it was applied with a rubber stamp. The signature does not resemble those of the same official. And the local records and the kingdom’s official gazette show no trace of the episode or of the letter.¹¹

Ask who benefits from it. It is addressed to “Raffaele Esposito Brandi”. Brandi was his wife’s family name, which an Italian man of that time would not have borne. Her nephews took over the pizzeria in 1932 and called it “Brandi”.¹²

One last detail remains, the most delicious of all. This forgery was itself forged in turn. Another version of the letter circulates — the same, but without the name “Brandi” — which turned up in a Parisian pizzeria run by a distant relative of Esposito.¹³

When a document pays, it gets copied. When it gets copied, it gets touched up.

“Parmentier had his potato field guarded so that people would want to steal the potatoes.” It is found in 1814, shortly after Parmentier’s death, in a biography written by his friend Julien-Joseph Virey. A further clue undermines it decisively: a similar ruse is told of the King of Prussia. When the same story is told of two figures in two countries, it is no longer a memory.¹⁴

Three stories, three dates of invention: 1814, 1929, 1932. None is more Italian or more French than the others.

Cooking, and why

No human society eats its food as it finds it. All of them transform it, and they do so for four reasons, only one of which concerns pleasure.

To make it edible. Many foods are indigestible, tough or toxic in their raw state. Cooking softens fibres, destroys certain poisons, and makes available nutrients that the body could not otherwise extract. Cooking is digestion done in advance, outside the body.
To preserve it. A food deteriorates because micro-organisms settle in it. Depriving them of what they need stops them: drying removes water, salting makes it unavailable, smoking adds compounds that kill them, cooling slows them down, and sugaring or acidifying makes the medium uninhabitable for most of them.
To make it safe. Heat destroys much of what makes people ill. This is the least visible function, and the most vital.
To make it good. Taste comes last in this list, but it is taste that decides what we actually eat.

Taste combines five basic tastes perceived by the tongue — sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami — with smells, temperature and texture. Much of what we call taste actually passes through the nose — precise percentages are often quoted, but without supporting evidence; most researchers agree that smell plays a dominant role. This is not the smell perceived as you bring the plate closer, but the one that rises from the back of the mouth to the nose while you chew. That is why everything seems bland when you have a cold, and why holding your nose makes it possible to swallow a bitter medicine.¹⁵

The tongue, for its part, distinguishes only the five basic tastes. The difference between a strawberry and a raspberry does not come from the tongue: it comes from the nose.

In practice, these four reasons cannot be separated. Smoking a fish preserves it, makes it safe and gives it its flavour — in a single action. That is precisely what makes the history of cooking hard to write: we do not always know which of the four reasons gave rise to a technique, nor whether those who used it knew themselves.

What is transformed

Cooking does not only make food good. It often makes it edible.

In Mesoamerica, maize is not cooked in plain water. It is cooked and soaked in limewater. The grain loses its outer coat and, above all, it releases a vitamin that otherwise remains locked away and unusable by the body.¹⁶

No one knew it in those terms. The vitamin was identified only in the twentieth century (the years 1900 to 1999). For three thousand years, people performed the right action without being able to explain it.

The same is true of fermentation. Fermenting is not letting food rot: it is deliberately introducing useful micro-organisms, which occupy the space and prevent others from settling. Bread, cheese, kimchi, injera, miso, fish sauces: a single principle, thousands of uses.

Here again, it was practised for millennia without anyone knowing why.

Understanding, when it finally came, did not come easily. Around 1835, three researchers — one Frenchman, two Germans — looked at yeast under the microscope and all three reached the same conclusion: it is a living being, and it is what produces fermentation.¹⁷

The greatest chemists of the day mocked them. Two of them even published a joke text, in which yeasts are described as tiny animals shaped like stills.¹⁸

It would take twenty years, and the work of Louis Pasteur, for the idea to be accepted. Both should be remembered: those who saw it first, and the one who got it accepted. They are not the same people.

And an error from which no one profited

A map of the tongue is often shown: sweet at the tip, salty and sour on the sides, bitter at the back. It is wrong. All areas of the tongue perceive all tastes.

It comes from a drawing published in 1942 by a Harvard professor, based on measurements made in 1901 and published without a scale. He misread them, and his textbook was authoritative. In 1974, the researcher Virginia Collings repeated the experiment and published the correction. That was more than fifty years ago, and the false map still appears in school textbooks.¹⁹

Here, no one stood to gain anything: no seller, no country to glorify, only a book that people took at its word. The case resembles that of the three researchers who were right about yeasts and were mocked for twenty years. Authority does not make something true. Nor does it make it false. It only decides what people listen to.

Measuring what is inside

Elsie Widdowson was a chemist. In 1933, in the kitchens of a London hospital, she approached a researcher named Robert McCance to tell him that he was using the wrong method to measure the sugar in apples. They would work together for sixty years.²⁰

In 1940, they published a book giving, for most of the foods commonly eaten in Britain, what they contain — and what they still contain after cooking, something no one had done before. Almost all the nutritional tables in the world descend from it.²¹

Then the war restricted supplies, and the British government had to ration. Widdowson and McCance designed a diet based on what remained available: bread, cabbage, potatoes. They then did something unusual: they followed it themselves for three months, then set off to walk and climb in the mountains of northern England, in the depths of winter, to check that it was possible to work hard while eating this way.

Their conclusion changed the country’s policy: bread and vegetables remained off the ration, so that those doing heavy work would have enough energy. Their trials also led to calcium being added to all British bread, which is still done today.²²

What is lost

Maize went round the world. The limewater technique, however, did not travel with it.

Where maize was adopted as a staple food without that technique being known — first in Europe, then in the United States — epidemics appeared: pellagra, a deficiency disease, with its sores, its fatigue and its disorders.²³

A cuisine is therefore not a backdrop. It is a technique, and half of it can be lost along the way.

What we do not know

Almost all societies have rules about what may and may not be eaten. Some are religious, others are not.

So does ours, for that matter. There are animals that are eaten elsewhere and not eaten in France, without any law forbidding it. These rules go unnoticed because they are familiar.

Where do they come from? One explanation is often given: it was for hygiene, since meat used to spoil quickly.

Specialists do not accept it. First, because nothing was known about microbes at the time when these rules were laid down. Second, because it does not explain why one animal is forbidden and another is not, regardless of the danger.

An English anthropologist, Mary Douglas, proposed another idea in 1966: the animals set aside might be those that do not fit neatly into the categories of the world as these societies conceive it. Her phrase has stuck: dirt is matter out of place.²⁴

Her explanation is debated too, and she acknowledged its weaknesses.

So we do not know. That is an honest answer.

What is lacking

In the global history of food, there is not only what circulates: there is also what is in short supply.

Five United Nations organisations publish a joint report on world hunger every year. In the mid-2020s, the figure announced is of the order of six hundred and fifty million people, or a little under eight in a hundred. It is falling slowly at the scale of the planet — but it is rising in Africa and Western Asia, and in Africa it now affects more than one person in five.²⁵

This figure deserves a closer look, because it teaches something about figures themselves.

First, it is not an exact number: it is the middle of a range. For the year 2024, the report’s headline was “673 million”. But the body of the text states: between 638 and 720 million. Eighty-two million people separate the two bounds — and the number that gets remembered is simply the one in the middle.²⁶

Second, it changes after the fact. The same year is put at 8.2% of the world population in one report, then at 8.1% in the next: estimates are revised as new data arrive. The report itself points out that recent global progress is partly explained by new data from India.²⁷

This is not a flaw. It is how something so vast is measured. But it is better to know this before settling on a figure.

Note 1

The first written record of chili in China dates from 1591—and it isn’t exactly a rave review. Gao Lian, a playwright who lived near what is now Shanghai, wasn’t “all that excited about it as a condiment or a medicine,” Dott says of his account. Instead, he used it as a decorative plant.

Blakemore, Erin, “The surprising story of how chili crisp took over the world”, National Geographic, 12 April 2024