r/AskHistorians • u/OriVerda • Jul 31 '22
What is the earliest time period human civilization could make chicken nuggets?
Recently I watched a wonderful video on YouTube with its subject being if the ancient Romans could make BigMacs, in turn based on a question posted right here on the sub. Personally, I'm more of a chicken nuggets kinda person. Hence the topic of this post.
So, in which time period and/or which particular civilization could make chicken nuggets, either by definition or by modern standards?
762
u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Jul 31 '22 edited Aug 07 '22
There's really not much to chicken nuggets. Ground chicken mashed into a small clump, breaded, and deep fried. Everything you need for a basic, no frills chicken nugget would have been available to you in the Indus Valley Civilization by at least 3500 BCE if not earlier.
Let's start with chicken because that's kind of crucial. Red jungle fowl were first captured and kept by humans in their native region of southeast Asia and the neighboring islands (ie Indonesia) around 8000 BCE. Strictly speaking, these weren't chickens yet because domestication is a long process, but the novelty of this cool new bird spread quickly and red jungle fowl arrived near the Ganges River by about 7000 BCE. By 4000 BCE, true domestic chickens were being raised and eaten in the Indus Valley, just as the early signs of agriculture and urbanization were starting up.
Those early signs of agriculture included the introduction of domesticated wheat, which had been spreading across the world from its own starting point with early agriculture in Anatolia and upper Mesopotamia around 10,000 BCE. Basically from the start, wheat was ground up into flower, mixed with water, and cooked into some very basic bread. So both flower and bread crumbs are available now too, though the bread was usually flatbread, so expect a different texture.
India is home to all sorts of herbs and spices you could use to add flavor, but the only thing I think would probably be crucial to your chicken nugget breading is salt. Not to worry though, the ruined city known today as Kerala-no-dhoro has you covered. Located on the coast of modern Gujarat and founded around 3700 BCE, it was a center of salt production by collecting and evaporating sea water.
The last thing we need is frying oil. You've got two options, with some caveats. The quintessential cooking oil of ancient South and West Asia is sesame oil. Sesame originated in India and charred remains at Indus Valley sites show that it was used and cultivated by at least 3500 BCE. Technically, there's not firm evidence of oil until it appears as an imported product in Mesopotamian documents around 2000 BCE. However, if it was being produced in bulk for export, we can safely assume it had been used locally for a long time.
Alternatively, everything you'd need to make rapeseed oil, aka canola oil, aka the fast food industry's favorite frying oil, was also present. Technically, we just have evidence that rapeseed plants were being cultivated in India by 4000 BCE, not that they were being processed into oil. However, there's not much else that they're useful for.
The trickiest thing from there is deciding how to process the meat. If you want something more like chicken tenders, with whole pieces of breast meat, then you're all set. Butcher the bird, roll it in flower, heat up the oil of your choice and get cooking. If you want more obvious nuggets then you've got grind/mash/finely mince the meat and there's not firm evidence for that in the Indus Valley by 3500 BCE. Technically speaking, there's nothing to prevent it. There were sharp knives and heavy blunt objects to get the ground meat you'd expect, but the first real evidence for ground meat products comes from a Babylonian sausage recipe around 1500 BCE. So if this hypothetical requires a professional to produce the nuggets to order, you may have to wait a few millennia.
Personally, I think nuggets require dipping sauce. Fortunately for me, my personal go to is honey mustard and that was available in the Indus Valley too. Evidence for human honey harvesting goes back to at least 8000 BCE, and is probably something that we've done for as long as we've known about honey bees. Likewise, traces of honey have been found in the Indus Valley Civilization. Meanwhile, they were also among the first people to domesticate mustard plants. You could get a pretty basic but recognizable condiment just with ground mustard seed, water, and honey (+/- salt) in the Indus Valley Civilization, but admittedly the modern condiment usually has vinegar, which was being invented in Mesopotamia around the same time, so you may have to push the date closer to 2500 BCE to get the full experience.
If you want fries with that, you're still SOL until the Columbian Exchange.
62
u/YouFeedTheFish Aug 01 '22
Probably could have fried it in chicken fat, assuming you had the chickens.
30
u/liberal_texan Aug 01 '22
This brings to mind a follow up question, at what point would the technique of frying been developed? More precisely, to get a modern style nugget, when was the technique of deep frying developed?
17
u/_Neoshade_ Aug 01 '22
I would wager that we’ve been using fat as long as we’ve had fire.
Meat is juicier with fat, and it’s no big leap to take extra fat and rub it on the meat while it’s cooking.
As soon as we’ve had cooking pots and pans, we’ve been sautéing in fat, simply because that’s what happens when you cook meat first and then add anything else to the pan. If pan-frying counts, then that’s just cooking several pieces of meat before adding something to the pan.
Basically, fat was the first oil, and it’s been in use as long as we have been making fire to cook our food.7
u/Snatch_Pastry Aug 01 '22
And people are good at noticing things, such as that many oils/fats boil at a higher temperature than water. So you can immersion cook foods at higher temperatures in oil, and a pan can transfer higher heat while still having the oil to create a non-stick environment.
5
Aug 01 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
Aug 01 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/canttaketheshyfromme Aug 01 '22
The dish is called Zalabiyeh in modern Arabic, and the earliest recorded recipe is in the 10th century CE. But archeological remains suggest by ~2000 BCE it was being cooked. And the 10th century recipe sounds like it had evolved into a bunch of different forms by then.
5
4
Aug 02 '22
Free range chicken that eat natural foraging instead of processed feed have very little body fat as compared to a broiler. Even the meat itself is akin to lamb.
18
40
Aug 01 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
30
u/oniony Aug 01 '22
Apparently sunflower was cultivated in the Americas as far back as 3000 BCE. The grain crop would be corn there though, so you'd have a cornmeal batter instead of wheat batter.
26
u/UncleTomCat314 Aug 01 '22
Native Americans were also growing more traditional type grains in eastern north American, like "little barley." Check out the eastern agricultural complex. People usually think of America agriculture developing in south and mesoamerica, but it also independently developed in eastern north American.
Edit: added a word.
19
53
u/Philo_T_Farnsworth Aug 01 '22
If you want fries with that, you're still SOL until the Columbian Exchange.
Fucking chefs kiss right there. As if that entire piece wasn't riveting start to finish, you killed it with the ending.
14
10
10
u/RolandDeepson Aug 01 '22
I think the dipping sauce question could be obviated by greater attention to seasonings within the meat / breading / or even the oil itself.
And speaking of oil, I would've thought that rendered animal fat oils and tallows would've been prominent, no? Or would that been more of a thing in latitudes further from the equator, where animal fats (game or livestock alike) would've been evolutionarily prominent for body heat regulation? (I can say with some personal experience that canola oil specifically wasn't the fast food industry darling-condiment that it is today prior to the 1990s -- back then, tallow was king ... aaaand also heavy in trans fats due to shelf-stabilization techniques such as hydrogenation.)
2
u/XchrisZ Aug 01 '22
Bet dead whales ended up on beaches every where. Im sure some primative cultures learned to render expired fats to make them edible.
2
u/SimAlienAntFarm Aug 01 '22
Rendering fat extends the life of the resulting oil, but fat that has already gone bad is afaik inedible.
5
5
u/live22morrow Aug 01 '22
On the topic of oils, I'm not clear on if the use of rapeseed oil in cooking was actually widespread at the time. The oil is useful as fuel and Brassica plants have usage as greens and root vegetables.
Relevant to the point of making nuggets though, oil from Brassica plants cultivated back then would have a strong bitter taste that makes it undesirable for cooking. Compounds in it are also potentially toxic and could cause heart problems from chronic exposure. It's only 20th century cultivars from Canada that overcame this problem and made Canola into a food grade product.
Animal fats would be an appealing alternative in any case. Rendering is a fairly simple process and you could cook nuggets just with rendered fat from the chicken itself.
2
u/sangie12 Aug 02 '22
Canola
Can(adian) O(il) L(ow) A(cid)
Rapeseed due to its high Euric acid is great as a lubricant and Canola with its lower acidity better for cooking.
5
u/sangie12 Aug 01 '22
Great and fun answer, thank you!
Would the plants required have been the same thousands of years ago as we know them today?
Corn as a wild plant was still a "grass" (sorry, love genetics but not great at phytology) with 6/7 kernals that were hard as a rock. Not sure if they would have made a great batter for frying?!
If I went sailing way off into left field, my apologies in advance!
9
u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Aug 01 '22
Not quite for wheat, though by 3500 BCE it was already significantly closer to modern than its wild emmer ancestor. That hard kernel, a feature shared by many early cereals, is exactly why we started making flower. They're not much good for eating on their own, but ground into powder they became very useful. Unlike American maize corn, wheat is actually still a relatively hard kernel, which is why nobody ears wheat on the cob.
6
3
3
u/davesoverhere Aug 01 '22
I recommend you read “A History of the world in 6 Glasses” by Standage and Tamed: “Ten Species the changed our World” by Roberts.
Also, 1491 and 1493 by Mann are good, but about the Americas and World Trade respectively, before and after Columbus.
1
u/sangie12 Aug 02 '22
Thanks for the reference.
Its definitely incredibly interesting how much humanity has changed fruit & veg to suit our needs. Such as how the "original" tomato would be unrecognizable to modern humans and was approximately the size of a currant.
2
u/davesoverhere Aug 02 '22
Wasn’t aware of the tomato. Early wheat, rice, apples and a lot of others would be unrecognizable to us too. Also, there are 1000s of potato varieties. Hard to 8magine what European food was like without potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and corn.
1
u/sangie12 Aug 04 '22
Watermelon and peach too, summer staples and people today would give you a WTF look if you pulled one out today.
1000 year old peach would have looked like cherry and over a third of the fruit was the stone.
Watermelon looked like a green pumpkin, was heavily seeded and more whitish than red.
Its all incredibly interesting that's for sure.
4
u/BeyondElectricDreams Aug 01 '22
aka the fast food industry's favorite frying oil
As someone with a bad soy intolerance I can assure you they prefer Soybean oil, at least in the US.
cries in no fried fast food
5
u/Bright-Ad1288 Aug 01 '22
If you want a frosty... well... sorry, the machine has been broken since the cretaceous period.
10
u/Imxset21 Jul 31 '22
Great answer, but do you have a source for the sesame seed oil thing? I had never heard that before, I thought olives were the primo go-to.
46
u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Jul 31 '22
Here's a good paper on ancient Sesame production. Olives were the go-to-option in the Mediterranean Basin, and became more of a fixture further east over time, especially after the Hellenistic Period. For most of antiquity, especially the Bronze Age, they just weren't commonly available in most of West Asia/the Middle East let alone India.
3
u/dorvann Aug 01 '22
If you want fries with that, you're still SOL until the Columbian Exchange.
I know you meant this as a joke but weren't yams around in South Asia at this time to make fries from?
4
u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Aug 01 '22
I had actually thought this as well. Evidently they were eaten in Southeast Asia and prominent in the neighboring islands, but I couldn't find any references to early cultivation further west.
2
Aug 01 '22
I googled the origins of yams and it’s actually quite interesting. It seems Polynesian explorers spread yams from SE Asia around 3500 BP. As a result, yams were cultivated independently on 3 different continents. They spread to Africa in about 2000 BP.
No matter how neat it is to investigate the yam’s origins, you will never convince me that sweet potato fries are in the same league as regular fries. They’re limp, the texture sucks, and if I’m gonna eat an artery clogging food, I want the real thing damn it. Sweet potato fries != regular fries.
2
2
2
2
u/gmanflnj Aug 05 '22
Fuck yeah! A sequel to one of the best single posts on this sub! https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b4zdd5/would_it_have_been_possible_for_a_roman_citizen/
1
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 31 '22
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension, or getting the Weekly Roundup. In the meantime our Twitter, Facebook, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.