Q&A with Ken Albala

He was awesome 8 months ago and he’s still awesome today 😆

I know this is from 8 months ago, but I ADORE Ken Albala! I have his Great Courses series and it's wonderful

Jeeyon Shim

I'm curious about the roots of the porridge made famous by Hell's Kitchen in Minneapolis, Mahnomin Porridge. It's said to have been inspired by a Native American dish described in the journals of 19th-century fur traders. The modern dish is hearty and creamy, full of wild rice, nuts, and dried fruit. But I've never found any details on what it was like in its original form.

Jen With One N

Any chance there's a good history of squid ink in cooking?

If you’re still taking questions. I like to know about the history of hydrosols and perfumes used in food across time.

Touching on what several others have asked, of the gaps in our historical cooking knowledge (mystery ingredients, extinct ingredients, unspecified processes), which one vexes him the most? Gotta love any recipe that includes the equivalent of "prepare in the usual way".

I would love to ask him about the history of hot spicy food. How this paradox of enjoying a fiscal painful experience became a staple in food cultures all around the world. (Perhaps it doesn't sound like it but I absolutely love spicy food:))

Some ancient, kingly recipes call for the meat to be cooked alive. Did that actually taste any better or was it merely a show of dominance and status to get served a meal so ceremoniously cooked?

Is there a recipe from the past that we will never be able to make either because the ingredients are unknown (they are listed, but we don't know to what they are referring) or because they no longer exist.

Just to clarify -- when you say "American biscuit" do you mean what Americans call "biscuits" or what Americans call "cookies" (And Brits call "biscuits")?

At what point did eggs become larger? i.e. when following old recipes, how old is old enough to need to halve the number of eggs to account for eggs being larger nowadays?

Alice

What is one extinct ingredient, you wish you still could access?

Victoria Howard

What are, in historical recipes, the combinations of ingredients and flavors we would now find more daring? Have you actually tried them?

How did once-universal dishes like blancmange disappear?

Umberto Hecko

I second this! maybe a follow up to add. "Traditional" dishes are hardly ever kept consistent generation to generation. It seems to me that nearly every "traditional" recipe from Europe or Asia these days has ingredients indigenous to the Americas. Is it possible to find the routes of these dishes pre-contact?

Nathan Blubaugh

also address the confusion between lamprey and eels. Now or then, these can be mixed up.

Nathan Blubaugh

I'd like to hear a bit about pivotal innovations to the history of grain use and cultivation. • How different is grain today? • Pre-industrialization, was white flour really only for the rich? • When looking at old baking recipes, what compensations should we make when using modern grain ingredients? • What books would provide a deep dive into this topic?

Nathan Blubaugh

What’s the relation between eels fried in a pan and poisonings in the late Medieval era? It’s a feature in ballads like Lord Randall and one of my high school literature teachers whose specialty was that era said it was a fairly common method of poisoning, sort of what arsenic was to the Victorians. If you know anything about this it’s something I’ve always wanted to know more about! Maybe there’s some special step in the cooking process that can have deadly results if ignored. Alternatively, what’s some interesting varieties of peasant food you know of? I’d sadistically love to see Max cook lampreys 😂

What is the history of the American biscuit? How did it develop? When did it become what we know it as today? To clarify, I mean what Americans call biscuits, e.g. biscuits and gravy.

How did contact with Europeans change the food of indigenous people in the Americas? I'm curious because we often talk about how food in the rest of the world changed due to the Columbian Exchange, but less about the reverse. When you pointed out in your last video that the Spanish introduced pigs to the Americas it got me thinking.

I’m curious about the history of candy canes, specifically the origin of monks or priests giving them to the boys in the choir to keep them quiet during mass, what they were made of, what they tasted like and if the shape was influenced by the shepherds staff. Thank you 😊

What ingredient do you wish you could source for a particular dish or cuisine?

What is a dish you knew more about so you could recreate it more accurately? (i.e. "the one that got away")

You have one free ride in a time machine: which historical figure would you join for dinner?