Both of these are going to be off the top of my head, but: cheese may have first been created when desert nomads carried milk in animal stomachs (camel milk in camel stomachs, I guess?) which caused the milk to mix with the stomach enzymes (rennet) and curdled the milk, and they were probably like, eh, it's still edible! And subsequent generations elevated it into an art, or something.
Similarly, sushi was originally not meant to have rice in it - fish were preserved in fermented rice, and when it was time to eat the fish you'd throw away the rice because, duh, it's spoiled. And then someone came up with the bright idea of adding vinegar to the rice, because it was the sourness of the rice that kept the fish safe from microbes, and then once you had sour vinegar you didn't really need to spoil the rice, and so you could eat the fish and the rice at the same time - and if you wrap the whole thing in seaweed, it's so much less messy to eat! So it became kind of like finger food for the Japanese ("like hot dogs", was the analogy in the article I'd read this in) till they elevated that into a fine art.
Re: breakthroughs> Also, if you observe the more interesting bits of Chinese cuisine, it can also originate in "dude, we're starving, anything looks edible."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-04-12 03:51 am (UTC)Similarly, sushi was originally not meant to have rice in it - fish were preserved in fermented rice, and when it was time to eat the fish you'd throw away the rice because, duh, it's spoiled. And then someone came up with the bright idea of adding vinegar to the rice, because it was the sourness of the rice that kept the fish safe from microbes, and then once you had sour vinegar you didn't really need to spoil the rice, and so you could eat the fish and the rice at the same time - and if you wrap the whole thing in seaweed, it's so much less messy to eat! So it became kind of like finger food for the Japanese ("like hot dogs", was the analogy in the article I'd read this in) till they elevated that into a fine art.
Re: breakthroughs> Also, if you observe the more interesting bits of Chinese cuisine, it can also originate in "dude, we're starving, anything looks edible."