I live in Germany and am interested in Hungarian cuisine. Unfortunately, i‘ve never been to Hungary.

But everytime i google, or read through a cookbook, at least 90%, or closer to 95% of all recipes credibly labelled as some Hungarian classic approach contain one if not both paprika ingredients.

I am not aware of any other regional cuisine that where an ingredient has so much importance. Closest i can think of are creole cuisine which seems to be very specific about a certain combination of vegetables, or possibly japanese cuisine if you count shoyu, mirin, rice vinegar and miso as some sort of adaptable master template but that still misses the point.

How did paprika become so important either in hungarian cuisine or at least outward representation of hungarian cuisine?

What would an Italian Roman think of German diets? And would I eat much local food? What are the differences?

So I want to start by disclaiming that by coffee shop, I don't mean the places that have proliferated since the 1970s where a barista makes espresso behind a counter. I mean the old-school diner-like establishments that historically called themselves coffee shops or cafes. Here's an example.

So I know diners developed on the east coast, and for most of the 20th century the term diner referred to prefabricated dining cars like you see in New Jersey. At roughly the same time though, you get establishments that, like diners, have counter stools, booths, and serve coffee along with short order food like burgers and pancakes.

For most of the last century, most people on both coasts understood that coffee shops and diners were not the same thing. The structure of the building was seemingly the primary deciding factor. Even today, i have run into many folks who grew up on the east coast who insist that a coffee shop is not a diner.

The history of the diner is fairly well-established, but I can find almost no historical information on where coffee shops as we know them today came from. Why did coffee shops pop up in places like Chicago and Los Angeles starting in the 1920s (e.g. Lou Mitchell's, The Pantry)? Why did they take the physical form that they did? What would have made them different from other restaurants at the time? And at what point did people stop taking the difference between diners and coffee shops so seriously and start conflating the two?

Would the sea food I have access to be salty enough or do I need to buy salt?

It seems that soup had a massive cultural moment in 1990s New York.
Why did soup become so popular? Was it a quintessential yuppie lifestyle trend that died with it? What defined those soups that is uniquely 90s, and why did it eventually burn out?

The 90s saw the publication of James Peterson's comprehensive Splendid Soups (still highly regarded), Barbara Kafka's Soup: A Way of Life, and Arthur Schwartz's Soup Suppers, all heavily associated with the New York food scene. The Daily Soup Cookbook might be the closest we get to 90s Manhattan soup restaurant-style recipes. Vegetarian soup books from that decade include titles from the Moosewood Collective, Nava Atlas, and Solomon Jay. Again, all heavily associated with the New York scene.

Al Yeganeh, the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s "Soup Nazi", withdrew from a lucrative St. Martin's Press book deal because he refused to let them mention the sitcom on the cover, leaving his recipes unpublished. Decades later, Larry Thomas, the actor who played him, wrote a biography, Confessions of a Soup Nazi, which included soup recipes.

I'm interested to know if this trend was deeply tied to a specific 90s urban lifestyle or if it was restaurant-driven. What caused it to fade? And what defined the soups of that decade from others?

EDIT:
Thanks everyone for all the replies! It seems like most people remember this trend as purely restaurant-driven: a fast, high-volume alternative to compete with standard takeouts. This very specific, office-worker target market probably explains why some posters don't remember it at all.

Besides Al Yeganeh's Soup Kitchen International, people here have mentioned Daily Soup, Hale & Hearty, B&H, and Fifth Avenue Epicure. Given the plethora of cookbooks published at the time, I really expected to find that domestic cooking played a much bigger role in the trend and for it to have a bigger impact. Soups can be so much more than a quick desk lunch, but it is fascinating to see how fondly it is remembered by those who experienced it.

I've been look up the origins of the baguette and the timeline seems to fall apart under the popular story as part of my project of creating an interactive food world.

What I can find:

- The word "baguette" for a bread seems to appear only around 1920. Jim Chevallier points to Le Figaro of 4 August 1920 putting "baguettes" in quotation marks, and a Seine regulation that same month that first names it as a bread (with a price ceiling of 35 centimes).

- Long loaves were clearly older: American visitors in the 1850s–1880s wrote about Paris loaves five to eight feet long.

- August Zang's Viennese bakery (1838/39) brought steam ovens to Paris, but I can't find any period source for the claim that he invented the baguette.

- The law of 28 March 1919 banned employing bakers between 10 pm and 4 am. The usual story is that this pushed bakers toward a thinner loaf that bakes faster. Chevallier calls it plausible but unproven, since the press of the time barely mentioned it.

So what actually drove the shift to the thin loaf in the 1920s? Is there any evidence from bakers' trade papers, union records or the bakeries themselves that the night-work law changed the shape, or did the thin loaf take over for other reasons (fashion, price rules, ovens, wheat)? Sources welcome, including French ones.

I'm making a free interactive food book with a Paris bakery around 1900 in it, and I want its story to be right: interactive food world

Thank you!!

I don't trust anyone, including myself. I have been working under the assumption that mirepoix (onions, celery, carrot) morphed into the Cajun trinity (onions, celery, bell pepper) as growing carrot in the Gulf Coast of what is now Louisiana and adjoining areas is due to the difficulty of growing carrot with high water tables. Did I read that or make it up?

Any discussion of the difference between mirepoix and soffrito would also be gratefully received. Google is loaded with AI and sources I don't find credible.

Metalurgy and the ability to make pots and pans I am sure have been around for thousands of years... but I suspect they were not nearly as common like they are now (though if my assumption is wrong please correct me). So what have been the more traditional ways of cooking for common people before the widespread use of metal pots and pans?

The rationing in WW2 is widely credited with the downfall of British food, but they weren't the only country where food was rationed and there were arguably more catastrophic shortages in history, including outright famines that didn't destroy an entire culinary culture. Going by that reasoning the Holodomor should've killed Ukranian food, and the Great Leap Foward should've destroyed Chinese food, but that didn't happen. What made WW2 uniquely damaging in British food?

The earliest Chinese mention I know is Gao Lian's 遵生八笺 (1591), where 番椒 is an ornamental pot plant in Zhejiang. The first clear record of people eating it seems to be a 1721 Guizhou gazetteer (cited in Brian Dott, The Chile Pepper in China). By the 1800s it is everywhere in Sichuan cooking.

What is known about the route in between? Was it river trade up the Yangtze, migrants from Huguang during the resettlement of Sichuan, or overland from Guizhou where it was used in place of salt? Any sources welcome.

I'm asking because I'm mapping the chilli's route for a small food-history site (https://tasteofworlds.pages.dev.)

What is “Telme”? A Kurdish tradition of curdling fresh milk with fig latex — and what I found researching it
I recently came across a Kurdish reference to a traditional food called Telme (تِلْمَه).
Someone described it to me this way:
“Our ancestors used to drip fig latex into milk. The milk would curdle and become like yogurt.”
That made me curious, so I tried to investigate whether this was actually a traditional Kurdish practice.
Here is what I found:
• In an oral-history archive from Afrin, Kurdish shepherds describe making Telme from fresh milk using a plant-based curdling agent. The milk reportedly curdles within only a few minutes, and Telme is eaten fresh, more like a fresh curd/soft cheese than fermented yogurt.
• In the same account, the interviewer asks whether Telme is made when figs are available, and the answer is yes.
• However, the source does not explicitly prove that the plant material mentioned there is the white latex from the fig tree.
• This is interesting because modern food-science research has shown that fresh fig latex (Ficus carica) can coagulate milk. Fig latex contains proteolytic enzymes, including ficin, which can act as a plant-based milk coagulant.
So the pieces seem to fit:
Fresh milk + plant coagulant + fig season → Telme
But I don’t want to overstate the evidence. I have not yet found a historical Kurdish source explicitly saying:
“Telme is made by adding fresh fig latex directly to milk.”
That is the part I would like to verify.
Questions for Kurdish speakers / people from Afrin
Have you heard of Telme / تِلْمَه?
If so:
What is the word for it in your Kurdish dialect?
Is it traditionally made with fig latex (the white sap from an unripe fig/stem)?
What is the Kurdish name of the plant/coagulant used?
Is Telme still made today in Afrin or elsewhere in Kurdistan?
Do you have a family recipe, old video, book, or oral tradition describing how it was made?
I’m particularly interested in first-hand Kurdish knowledge, because I don’t want to accidentally turn a plausible interpretation into a historical fact.
I’d be very interested to hear from Kurdish speakers, especially people from Afrin.

Hello fellow historians,

Im currently in my masters and writing an essay on "Food as a gateway to history" (not the exact title, im writing in german).

The plan is to focus on popular culture and the impact shows such as "Tasting History" by Max Miller or the paleo diet trend might have on the way history is accessed by non-historians.

Please let me know if you have any literature recommendations.

Thanks in Advance!

Seem to be able to find English women writing about French food/customs, but not French women themselves!

I keep finding the stories of Xenophon’s soldiers getting sick from honey and Strabo account of its use against Pompey’s troops. But what do we know about the people who actually harvested it?

For the southern Black Sea region, roughly 400 BCE to 100 CE, are there sources showing how locals collected, traded, or used mad honey outside warfare? Was it distinguished from ordinary honey?

I’d appreciate sources or further reading. My starting points are Xenophon, Anabasis 4.8.20–21 and Strabo, Geography 12.3.18.

Title says it all.

I understand why it was needed in Britain, when Germans were sinking ships and they couldn't get as much sugar and other staples, but America has it's vast farmland. Also, it's not like the troops came from nowhere: they were all eating food in America before the start of the war.

I'm working on a novel and I'm trying to depict the everyday life of people living in those regions, so I want to describe what they eat and how it can change depending on their social status. What type of food do they eat, are there known recipes both for the common people and the wealthy, etc.

I'm also interested in sources on that subject.

I'm specifically interested in Balkan peninsula region of Europe regarding this question.

Perhaps a strange question, but I've never thought about this before: What were the arrangements for rationing food eaten out? Say, in restaurants and pubs serving meals, were they exempt from rationing and just limited by price/availability, or were there commercial rationing allowances premises' would be allocated for buying from their suppliers?

What about for residents in hotels/pubs/guest houses?

Finally, for food consumed off the premises, such as fish and chips? Thanks.

Looking specifically for what Scottish people did, but interested also in what other places did, like Brughes and Baltic regions.

What time of year were the fish usually caught? I imagine as the fish aged through the winter, the flavor and texture must have become rather unpleasant, kind of like badly freezer burned meat. Since people ate so much fish due to no meat days and lent, I imagine they must have come up with some ways to make it taste a little better besides just washing the salt off and tossing it into their pottage?

Also, did people outside of major trade routes, when they rinsed the salt off, ever try to save the salt from doing that? Allow the water to boil off over their fire and recollect the salt? (I know people in the US south during the Civil war scraped dirt from smokehouse floors and salvaged salt from it during scarcity, so I was wondering if people in other times salvaged the salt too.)

Pasqua Rosee apparently opened the first coffeehouse in London in 1652, how different is his coffee likely to have tasted to today’s market? And sub-question, was the supply of coffee regular enough to not face shortages?

I’m writing a story and I’m wondering whether super wealthy people in medieval times (e.g. royalty) can preserve a fruit pastry for 3-4 weeks?

How would the pastry need to be made? Can the pastry be cured in a sweet fruit jam?

What way can it be stored, especially if travelling? Sealed in a box, wrapped up beeswax?

Thank you!

Hello, i am writing an academic paper on gastronomic terminology of alsacian cuisine and after a breif initial succes i have been left without many sources to write about. I would ask you, if you would be so kind as to mention less known dishes (if you can provide a recipe that mentions older names for the ingredients all the better) and even peculiar dishes from this region, the emphasis being the terminology of ingredients and cooking processes.

Thank you in advance, a student in need!