Have you ever wondered how long a particular food has been around?

Check out this Food Timeline.

While admitting that precise dates are impossible for foods, since most of what we eat evolves rather than being invented, Lynn Olver nevertheless presents an impressive catalogue of dates. Dates appear around 6,000 BC, by the way, along with broccoli. But hopefully not together. Marshmallows, surprisingly, are quite the venerable foodstuff, dating from around 2,000 BC, preceding chocolate by 500 years. Grape tomatoes, on the other hand, are younger than I’d imagined at just ten years old. Deep-fried Coca-Cola, space cornbread and Kool-Aid pickles are unsurprising in age (2006-7), but it will be quite some time before I try any of them.

The Food Timeline page also provides links for literary menus, with a whole section devoted to Shakespeare’s food. We already know playgoers at the Globe theatre ate apples, pears, gingerbread and crunched hazelnuts in place of popcorn. The food was launched, not into space, but at actors to signal disapproval.

On the site you’ll find recipes, lists of foods served at banquets, links to cookbooks and excerpts from diet books from the period. One of my favourite passages differentiates appropriate meats by class:

“Beef is a good meate for an Englysshe man, so be it the beest be yonge, & that it be not know-flesche; yf it be moderatly powdered [i.e. salted] taht the groose blode by salt may be exhaustyd, it doth make an Englysshe man stronge; Veal is good and easily digested; Broawn [boar’s meat] is an usual meate in winter amonges Englisshe men; Bacon is good for carters and plowmen, the whiche be ever labouringe in the earth or dunge…”

Andrew Boorde’s Compendyous Regyment or Dyetary of Health of 1542

Lastly, there are lists of sources for further research, including the delightfully titled Take a Thousand Eggs or More: A Collection of 15th Century Recipes, by Cindy Renfrow.