Eat Your Vegetables: A History and Tasting Experience

In Medieval Europe, vegetables were considered peasant food and raw greens were thought to cause flatulence or plague. When the Spanish returned from their conquests in the New World with tomatoes and potatoes, Europeans feared tomatoes were poisonous and deigned potatoes fit only for animals or the desperately poor. In modern times, Western World foodies have realized the importance of vegetables in a healthy diet. In this course, we discuss how attitudes about vegetables have changed over the centuries—and we taste a few examples. We start with potage, the thick, one-pot stew that Europeans ate in the Middle Ages. We also sample the original version of the most popular salad in restaurants today—the Caesar, which was invented in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924. The instructor also offers a taste of her (secret for now) salad from her youth that inspired her career as a food writer.