Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.

On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.

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jasonwatkinspdx 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus.

Not at all. Many pre columbian foods remain popular today, like tamales. Corn, beans, squash, fish, nuts, and tropical fruit were all staple foods in pre contact Mesoamerica. Central American islanders were big on grilling fish over coals.

I don't think it was a miserably plain diet by any means.

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hyperpape 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of the most praised recent restaurants in the United States is based on an attempt to reconstruct pre-Colombian cuisine from the Americas: https://owamni.com/, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/how-owamni-bec....

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bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me).

Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.

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lava_pidgeon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on the area. German speaking areas and Eastern Europe do use lots of potato. Even the collagial name for German is potato

	▲	ginko 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm Austrian myself. There's plenty of potato dumplings etc., but they're just variants of other flour/cheese based dumplings. Potatoes are important but certainly not indispensable. Compare that to pork for instance. Remove that and you've removed like 50% of Austrian cuisine.

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mmooss 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> no dairy

They couldn't find one mammal from which to obtain milk? It's a pretty obvious thing to try, for obvious reasons.

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AlotOfReading 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The vast majority of the human population is lactose intolerant, both historically and today. Genetically intolerant populations in South and Central Asia have microbiotic help with their dairy-heavy diets, but for people who didn't spend thousands of years developing a culture around it, dairy is just a quick road to an upset stomach and/or food poisoning.

	▲	mmooss an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it. I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.

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jjtheblunt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

no beef? bison were ubiquitous, though.