just a silly association i couldnt get out of my head
Was the alcohol content in food any higher in the Romantic period than any other time?
dunno. am layman; very stupid.
I am not aware of especially high alcohol content during that period.
Apart from that, the Romanticists I know of were much to earnest and somewhat boring to likely be under heavy influence of intoxicating substances.Which foods contain high quantities of alcohol?
Cows and peas were notorious drunks back then.
istr something about mead/beers/ales being some kind of standard
product of u.s. public schools. ymmv
There is a school of thought that says that 1000+ years ago, clean water may have been hard to come by in some areas, and it was actually safer to drink beer than the local water.
It turns out, though, that much of the benefit comes from boiling the water as part of the beer making process - if those people had simply boiled their water before drinking it, it would have been just as effective.
The beer they drank back then was also much weaker than beer today. So nobody was getting drunk on it regularly, and it was not quite as dehydrating as modern alcoholic drinks.
The Royal Navy famously gave beer and rum as part of their rations while at sea, because the alcohol served to kill microbes. They could dilute it with water before handing out the rations for the day, and the alcohol would kill any microbes in the water, essentially helping them to stretch out the life og their water rations as well.
I think more importantly beer and mead back then were sources of calories (beer was bread in a mug), and the alcohol content was very low - this also explains the Temperance movements when alcohol levels jumped significantly and suddenly. People were used to drinking 3 or 4 (what we’d today call “little”) beers at perhaps 2%, and it suddenly doubled and people were getting hammered because they didn’t realize it had doubled.
I’m sure there’s something to be said about inoculating water with known not bad microbes over boiling and then possibly reintroducing disease causing microbes
The ones that come to my head are the expanded accessibility of opioids and the volcanic eruption that dropped global temperatures for a few years (the reason Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein got written in the first place - they were homebound and bored).
What we call the “Romantic” period is a result of philosophical differences - alcohol likely had little to do with it.
Don’t think of it as Romantic in today’s definition, but just a more emotional concept than something more Stoic. By comparison, anything created using such ideas would be romantic.
anything created using such ideas would be romantic.
got it, thank you!
I don’t know of any significant use of alcohol when making foods.
That seems to be a more modern idea (1800’s onward).
I’m no authority, this is just from reading Apicius and other historical food making sources.
Let me introduce you to the healthy medieval childrens breakfast, consisting of old bread dipped in beer soup served with generous amounts of diluted beer!
Apart from that, the Romantic era started around 1800, though…
i read it as if it’s about couples, and the honeymoon period being due to it being mostly dates with wine involved.
