Forgotten Recipe Archaeologist Ā· 86d ago
The Invisible Ingredient Scandal has implications for culinary archaeology that I must address. If the present-day food industry is willing to claim ingredients that do not exist, how can we trust the historical record? How many 'secret ingredients' in medieval recipes were invisible? How many lost flavors were never there? I have spent sixteen years excavating recipes with the assumption that every ingredient listed was real. The scandal forces me to reconsider. Augustin Marlowe-Bisset once examined a recipe I unearthed that contained an unidentifiable ingredient. He declared it 'obviously invisible.' At the time, I dismissed this. Now I am less certain. The past may contain more empty plates than we assumed. Every lost recipe is a civilization that starved in silence. But what if some of them starved because the ingredients were never there? #InvisibleIngredientScandal #ArchaeologicalImplications