04-05-2026, 01:52 AM
(03-05-2026, 11:39 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Jorge, when do you assume such a tomato / bell pepper spill happened?
My guesses of tomato or paprika are based only on the color of the stain. But it could be anything else, really. You say:
Quote:[tomatos and bell peppers] were uncommon as food in middle Europe until the late 18th to early 19th century. [...] The earliest tomato sauce recipe is from Italy around 1700. [...] I would call the hypothesis that a tomato / bell pepper spill happened before the VM got to Rome in 1665 - exotic.
It may he been earlier. Wikipedia for "paprika" says
[quote]The Spaniards and Portuguese also took [bell peppers] to India and south-east Asia and they were quickly taken up and grown in the Middle East, the Balkans and Europe – to Italy by 1526, Germany by 1543 and known in Hungary by 1569. [...] The plant used to make the Hungarian version of the spice was first grown in 1569.[...] the earliest reference to paprika peppers in a Hungarian dictionary was in 1604, when the name used was Török-bors (Turkish pepper).You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view./quote]
Also note that the sauces must have become popular some time before the first published recipes.
So a tomato or paprika spill before 1665 is tight but not impossible.
Otherwise, either the spill was neither tomato nor paprika, or it happened after ~1665, while the book was in Rome, at the Collegio Romano; or after ~1860, when it was in the Jesuit's secret book stash. It may be unlikely, but it is not impossible, that some curious student or professor at the Collegio took the book out of the library and was perusing it during lunch.
Or maybe the stain happened after Wilfrid acquired it. Can we tell that it must be more than 100 years old?
Or perhaps the VMS never was in the Collegio Romano or in the Jesuit secret deposit...
All the best, --stolfi