Peasant foods
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Peasant foods are those dishes specific to a particular culture made from accessible and inexpensive ingredients and usually prepared and spiced to make them more palatable. They have often formed a significant part of the diets of those who may live in poverty compared to the average for their society or country.
Peasant foods are so called as being the diet of peasants, that is, tenant or poorer farmers and their farm workers, and by extension, of other cash-poor people. They may use ingredients, such as offal and less-tender cuts of meat, which are not as marketable as a cash crop. Characteristic recipes often consist of hearty one-dish meals, in which chunks of meat and various vegetables are eaten in a savory broth, with bread or other staple food. Sausages are also amenable to varied readily-available ingredients, and they themselves tend to contain offal and grains.
Peasant foods often involve skilled preparation by knowledgeable cooks using inventiveness and skills passed down from earlier generations. Such dishes are often prized as ethnic foods by other cultures and by descendants of the native culture who still desire these traditional dishes even when their incomes rise to the point where they can purchase any food they like.
List of foods
- Baked beans the simple stewed bean dish, still popular
- Barbacoa a form of slow cooking, often of an animal head, a predecessor to barbecue
- Cholent a traditional Jewish sabbath stew
- Head cheese made from boiling down the cleaned out head of an animal to make broth, still made
- Hominy a form of corn specially prepared to be more nutritious
- Horsebread a low cost European bread, that was a recourse of the poor
- Lampredotto Florentine dish or sandwich made from a cow's fourth stomach
- Minestrone the meal in one pot of ancient Italy that is still a basic part of Italian cuisine
- Mulligan stew (food) a stew often made by itinerant workers
- Mujaddara an Arabian dish of lentils, rice, grains, and onions
- Pea soup or "pease pudding" a common thick soup, from when dried peas were a very common food in Europe, still widely eaten
- Pot-au-feu the French stew of oxtail, marrow, and vegetables, sometimes sausage
- Pottage a staple stew made from boiling vegetables, grains and whatever was available, since Neolithic times in the British isles
- Polenta a porridge made with the corn left to Italian farmers so that land holders could sell all the wheat crops, still a popular food
- Pumpernickel a traditional dark rye bread of Germany
- Ratatouille the stewed vegetable dish
- Red beans and rice, the Louisiana Creole dish made with red beans, vegetables, spices, and leftover pork bones slowly cooked together, and served over rice, common on mondays when working women were hand washing clothes
- Scrapple pig scraps, cornmeal and other flours and spices fried together
- Soul food some aspects come from foods that could be taken on a trans-atlantic passage, and farming in America
- Succotash a blend of corn and beans
- Taco foods placed on native flat breads in South and North America, very popular
See also
- Famine food, foods turned to in times of crisis, sometimes across whole societies
- Farm-to-table
- Social class
- Traditional knowledge
