>>20908
>and tell me how many dessert recipes can be done without non European ingredients
nono, of course we're globalized today. i grant you, many recipes require globally originated ingredients, wherever they're grown. i was mostly defending the possibilities europeans did have back before modernity. just ingredient choice, that was enough to achieve quite a bit.
and you can bet we would have created even more out of the limited pool if we somehow lost access to the global market, with the globalized tastes we have now. chefs who "go back to regional tastes" do this today, with self imposed constraints.
>honey
true, it would have been pricy, but a small batch as a treat on a wealthy farmer's plate, if he didn't need to sell the honey to survive, was technically possible.
>tarragon
i guess there just wasn't need for this sort of creativity. affordable coffee literally appeared around the renaissance period, and tea should have been there from even earlier in small amounts. sugar was pricy too, so maybe coffee was just favorable. but mint is used widely in drinks. tarragon is just a matter of getting introduced to. if coffee didn't exist in the sugar age, it could have spread.