Pasta la Feasta, Baby - Page 2
© Michael Martinez
Food is the most basic necessity for living organisms. We have to have it. And, according to some researchers, mankind has been cooking its food for 500,000 years. That's a long time. That's a lot of boiled meat and vegetables. And there is a serious proposal that Neanderthals invented soup.
The best estimates suggest we've been baking bread for 12,000 years or thereabouts. One retired farmer has even reportedly bred einkorn wheat, similar to the original strain used by Neolithic peoples. He apparently did this so that people who didn't want to eat processed breads could return to a more primitive, natural bread. I suppose it won't be long before we see loaves of Neolithic Meal (tm) on the shelves in specialty food stores.
Tea has graced our tables since 2737 BCE. People started eating mushrooms soon afterward, and potatoes hit the New World diet around 2500 BCE. Cheese and grapes go back about 6,000 years.
All these foods are mentioned by Tolkien. Did he check out some books on the history of cooking before writing his stories? I doubt it. But being a philologist who loved to base stories and elements of stories around words, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he knew the histories of these words. And if he knew there were ancient names for modern foods, then he knew those foods could be safely included in an imaginary time in our past.
Of course, Tolkien did let tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco slip into Europe a few thousand years too soon, but he knew he was being a bit loose with the timeline. At the time he wrote The Lord of the Rings he was being fairly meticulous, but he didn't catch everything. He didn't really make food an important part of the story, although in the Prologue to LOTR, Tolkien said of Hobbits that "growing food and eating it occupied most of their time".
Readers should be forgiven for not knowing what kinds of foods are actually mentioned by Tolkien. For all the eating the hobbits seem to do in the story, the actual foods consumed are seldom named. But we do get an inventory of Barliman's menu on the night that Frodo and company arrived in Bree "hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese good plain food, as good as the Shire could grow". (For what it's worth, tarts and pastries seem to date from the medieval or post-medieval period.)
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