I have always been interested, if not a bit obsessed by food. From trips abroad to odd corners of the globe, pointing at dishes in local restaurants with little idea of what we were about to receive, to days spent experimenting in the kitchen to get a particular dish just so, food is rarely more than half an hour away from my thoughts.
The last year or so has got rid of my commute, given me more reading time, more time for esoteric projects. I’ve been building up an increasingly extensive library of books about food: historic cookbooks, memoirs, collections of articles, psychology, economics, anything that has taken my interest. And this, paired with an unhealthy number of subscriptions to the burgeoning world of substack food writing newsletters - Vittles, Alicia Kennedy, Welsh Food, to name just a few - led me to where I got to in January, post-Christmas, far from underemployed but certainly on the hunt for some novelty.
I’d always been the main cook in the house, and 2020 gave me a bit more time for exploration and expansion of our repertoire - rather than spending an hour cooking every day, that started to become two, and not infrequently three or four. And then when the mood took us, we’d go nuts and do something a bit out there, like cooking the menu from the last night of the Titanic. These were challenging, a bit educational, and immense fun. And so when January 2021 came along, having just finished ‘Much Depends on Dinner’ by Margaret Visser, an extraordinary book deconstructing the history and culture behind a single ‘classic’ American meal, I decided it was time for a new project - Eating the Centuries.
Over the next 20 or so weeks - I intend to cook one meal which can claim to be historically of that era. The meals can be from anywhere in the world, from Japan to the Swahili coast to Ireland, and I will try and recreate a meal you could have eaten from that time, sometimes with kings, sometimes with peasants, occasionally with the clergy. It’s a daunting undertaking - I’m particularly worried about the medieval era - but it will all contribute towards what I’m always wondering about when reading about food - why do we eat what we eat now? Eating the Centuries will be going back to the Year Zero (a convenient end point, chosen for no other reason than sounding suitably auspicious and where the recipes becomes increasingly sketchy), and will look at how eating across the world has changed over the years.
I don’t know all the steps, but here’s where I’m starting:
20th Century - Southern American
19th century - Russia
18th century - North West Mediterranean
17th Century - Sichuan, China
What I’m reading: ‘Longthroat Memoirs’ - Yemisi Aribisala