What was Italian cuisine like before picrel? I'll watch ancient Roman recipes sometimes on youtube, and while nice, they seemed very limited.

Italians don't actually eat tomatoes you uneducated fuck

>>21463179 (OP)
i have the same question. cooked tomato is a true enrichment.
i believe it to be more like cacio e pepe or carbonara. just look for italian recepies without tomato

>>21463186
Shut up.
>>21463179 (OP)
It varies region to region. We weren't a unified country until after the introduction of tomato and tomato want fully accepted in all of its constituent kingdoms. Even in Naples/The Two Sicilies, where tomato was first accepted in use, there are still many, MANY dishes eaten to this day that don't have any. Neapolitan cuisine in particular has several savoury custards eaten as sauces for pasta (like carbonara, which supposedly is from Rome; that never made sense to me since Naples has several savoury custards and Rome had this one, single thing that popped up outta nowhere 80 years ago? Yeah, nah).
There's also the white versions of dishes that are better-known for their use of tomato, such as Bolognese (again, despite the claims otherwise, Bolognese sauce with tomato originated in Naples and not Bologna; theirs didn't have tomato and was just mince, aromatics and milk until just over a century ago), lasagne, cacciatora and others. There's genovese, which is an onion-based sauce. There are oil (or lard) based pasta toppings, such as pasta with broccoli or pasta with tinned fish (tuna or sardines are most popular). And so on and so on and so on.

>medieval italy
>ancient rome
not actually the same thing

>>21463223
yeah nah its all the same

>>21463179 (OP)
Sketti n' butter

>>21463179 (OP)
Most cuisine was limited before the age of exploration and the discovery of new world foods. You had to make due with what was indigenous to your area. A major factor to that whole rat race was even just Europeans getting sick of paying exorbitant prices for ingredients from Asian land trade.

>>21463223
depending on which historian you ask, ancient rome ended with the first crusade, or Napoleon's dissolution of the HRE, the fall of Rome to the Vandals, the end of Tsarist Russia or the more recent pedophillic scandals that ended the hegomony of the catholic church.

>>21463538
New World trade just got absorbed into the existing old world trade networks. Nutmegg, a spice which grows exclusively in the some far off south east asian islands, was known in Europe as early as 500~ CE.

>>21463538
As far as I've seen historical documentaries diet has been pretty much the same everywhere on the planet since the agricultural revolution: porridge of some kind of starchy carb supplemented with whatever scraps of meat, fish, eggs, plants, dairy and condiments one could find and afford. There are only slight superficial regional differences like the Romans may have used vinegar as a condiment for their porridge while the Japanese used fermented soy.

>>21463538
There's a massive amount of dishes you can make with stuff from around your country + whatever shit you can afford to buy from those sneaky Arab traders
>>21463691
Only if you were a poorshit peasant. Nobility had actual cuisine. But the peasants had cuisine also, they just only really put in the effort/money for holidays... which of course were more frequent than holidays nowadays.

>>21463699
>Nobility had actual cuisine.
Not necessarily better than peasant food because refined starch and sugar was expensive and considered a luxury. Religion encouraged (seasonal) vegetarianism for nobility as well.

>>21463733
Refined sugar is unnecessary for vast majority of cooking and can be easily replaced with honey for better results which was plentiful.
Starch was hard to get but its a niche ingredient. You really don't need starch.
I typically myself try to use as little foreign ingredients as possible, and its really not that difficult. In fact its rather easy to avoid all the new world ingredients, except the potato of course since I enjoy it quite a bit; old world seasonings like cloves and black pepper I don't avoid but they were obtainable.

I am a catholic and I don't eat meat on Fridays, that is how I was raised. This just means we have more fish and vegetable dishes in our cuisine though. I think it is a good thing, there's many interesting dishes because of this restriction.

>>21463179 (OP)
Probably a lot more fishy