Your friendly food history research service since 1999
November 8, 2019 8:26 AM   Subscribe

The Food Timeline
What is the history of your favorite food? That depends upon the food and how deep you want to dig. Take tiramasu. This dish was "created" in the late 20th century. You could find a few magazines articles confirming period popularity/origination and stop there. Or? You could go the next level and research the recipe based on composition. You would soon discover this dish was based on Victorian-era moulded creams which were based on Colonial-era tipsy cakes which were inspired by Renaissance-era trifles.
Explore the introduction and evolution of foods dating back to before 17,000BC and starting with ice. Pumpkin Pie | New Zealand Mutton Birds | Marrow Bones | SPAM | Mexican Wedding Cakes | Shakespeare's Food | Pan-Pak? | Peanut Butter Cookies | Lobsters, Crabs, Shrimp | Jamaican Jerk | Japanese Sushi & Sashimi | Chicago-style Pizza

The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015), a reference librarian with a passion for food history; the site can also be browsed alphabetically.
posted by youarenothere (7 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
While The Food Timeline has been linked in various posts over the years, it has not been directly linked to since 2005. I came across it this morning and wanted to share not only for the immensity of information, but also the comforting Web 1.0 aesthetic that I know many of us still delight in stumbling across.
posted by youarenothere at 8:26 AM on November 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


Neat and potentially quite useful.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:33 AM on November 8, 2019


Love this classic Web 1.0 site. I think it was first posted on the blue in 2002-- before it had its own domain name! Thanks for the tasty reminder.
posted by gwint at 8:42 AM on November 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Points, gwint, for being the food historian historian--so delightful to see that link from all the way back when!
posted by youarenothere at 8:58 AM on November 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Humanity has been sleeping on cherries since 16,000 BC! I had no idea it had such a long history and we've managed to do so little with it in all that time. Today we basically have pies and jars of literally bleached cherries that remove everything good about them in favour of red corn syrup.

I'd love to try many of these ancient foods. OG Marsh Mallow sounds like a trip!
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:32 AM on November 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


I was just looking at this! It's so nifty.
posted by JawnBigboote at 3:36 PM on November 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh man, this is great. Thank you for posting it!
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:39 AM on November 9, 2019


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