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You can ask this about a lot of foods, but probably won't get many satisfying answers. For example cheese goes back many thousands of years, and it's theorized
by falsemyrmidon 13d ago
You can ask this about a lot of foods, but probably won't get many satisfying answers. For example cheese goes back many thousands of years, and it's theorized that it was invented accidentally due to storing milk in sheep stomachs or similar.
Probably something similar for pickling. Someone noticed that salted foods last a long time, and vinegar never seems to go bad, so why not try combining them?
- rolisz 13d agoWhat about hakarl? "Rotten" icelandic shark meat. It stinks to high heaven. Yet somebody thought "let's eat this". I can't imagine how hungry they must have been. And, if it doesn't decompose for 6 weeks under sand, it's toxic, so you die if you eat it. I'm sure they knew that. Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
- steveBK123 13d ago> Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine. Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born. So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.
- maxerickson 13d agoThe acidity in many traditional pickling methods is lactic acid produced by fermentation. No vinegar involved. Looking it up, ocean water has the right salt content to facilitate this...
- _whiteCaps_ 13d ago"Pickling" things in vinegar is a relatively modern invention.