Not at all silly! I’m referring to the fact that changes in manufacturing processes, ingredients, and breeding of both flora and fauna mean that the food we eat today may taste significantly different from the food of 100 years ago and yet we still refer to it by the same name.
The most well-known example of this, of course, is the Gros Michel/Cavendish issue; until the 1950s, Gros Michel bananas were the most common export, but now mostly in the US we eat Cavendish bananas, which have a different flavor. Cooking with Gros Michel and Cavendish bananas are going to get you different end results because they taste different; Rex Stout’s banana bread won’t taste like Sam Starbuck’s, and also any seasoning in the recipe (spices, etc) is aimed at complimenting the Gros Michel, and may not work as well on the Cavendish. (This is in theory, I don’t know if he has a banana bread recipe or if it was written pre or post Cavendish.)
The same goes for a lot of fruits and vegetables – we haven’t necessarily changed breeds but we’ve certainly begun aggressively breeding for flavor or size or color, and we’ve also begun importing from hundreds or thousands of miles away, affecting freshness and flavor along the way. Which means a tomato today is a different beast from the tomato of fifty years ago.
In one of the Nero Wolfe short stories, Wolfe gives a recipe for corn: roasted in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, husked at the table, and served with only butter, salt, and pepper, “it is ambrosia”. But that’s for corn grown at a farm less than three hours from Wolfe’s home, picked less than half a day before it was cooked, and picked by hand just as it came fully ripe – Wolfe knows there’s something wrong and solves a murder because one delivery of his corn is of poor quality (too old, and picked too far previously). Stout acknowledges in his recipe that it’s unrealistic to be able to get corn like that, but corn grown from different strains, picked in Mexico, sorted by machine and shipped to Chicago where it sits in a misting box on a shelf for a few days before I buy it and take it home, that’s going to taste different. I’m not slamming the globalization of food (though elements of it are certainly an issue), but it’s simply a fact: they won’t taste the same. My corn, due to breeding and preservation techniques, might even taste better! But it will be a different taste. And when you’re dealing with the delicacy of flavor that Rex Stout often does, that can cause real issues.
This extends to all kinds of things. Flour is milled differently now, and made from different grains; most things that used sugar cane or sugar beet sweetening prior to 1970 now use high fructose corn syrup (though this is a trend that is slowly reversing). Processed foods, like macaroni and cheese boxes or Cheerios or Jello, have changed ingredients to improve flavor or ease of cooking or health benefits to the people who eat them. Meat is fed differently (beef being fed primarily on corn because it bulks cows up like crazy is the most evident example) and that affects the flavor of the meat, too.
This gets even more bonkers the deeper you go. The reason modern recipes, especially baking recipes, often call for both butter and milk is that they used to call for cream, but people stopped buying cream and started buying lower fat milk, so now you have to use your lower-fat milk plus butter added to simulate cream. A recipe that called for cream was less likely to be made when people stopped buying cream, and new recipes in the second half of the 20th century were primarily the province of ad companies, who wanted you to buy their product and cook with it. If people were more likely to cook with a product that used butter and milk instead of cream, the ad companies would design recipes that way.
So if you’re looking at a recipe from before the 1980s or so, understand that the recipe is designed with ingredients that might be vastly different from, and yet share a name with, the ingredients of today. Which affects the flavor of the finished product.
Time travel is so weird, am I right?
If you enjoy reading about food history, consider passing me a ko-fi!
