20 Everyday Foods That Were Once Luxuries For The Rich

In Elizabethan England, refined sugar was still an expensive imported luxury used primarily by the wealthy in banquets, sweets, and elaborate sculptures of candied marzipan. When German traveler Paul Hentzner visited Elizabeth I at Greenwich Palace in September 1598, he recorded that her teeth were black, likely from decay caused in part by her fondness for sugar. In other words, the Queen could afford enough sugar to ruin her teeth! Popular legend has it that poorer Elizabethans even blackened their teeth with soot to imitate the wealthy, but this remains folklore and has yet to be substantiated with archaeological evidence.

Because they rarely survived the trip across the Atlantic whole, pineapples were very rare fruits in 18th-century Europe. In Britain, hostesses often rented them from confectioners to use as centerpieces at dinner parties in the evening, after which they were returned to the confectioner and resold, now overripe. A 1769 treatise by Adam Taylor describes the construction of special manure-heated glass houses called ‘pineapple pits,’ and a single hothouse pineapple could cost as much as £80.

In the 1667 Treaty of Breda, which largely allowed both sides to keep the territories they already controlled, England kept Manhattan while the Dutch retained the Indonesian island of Run and the Dutch colony of Suriname. Run was part of the Banda Islands, where nutmeg trees grew at the time. The Dutch wanted to protect their nutmeg monopoly, especially since Europeans believed nutmeg warded off the plague, and the violent Dutch East India Company kept a tight rein on supply. Manhattan for nutmeg sounds wild now, but nutmeg was serious business back then!

Salt wasn’t exclusively eaten by the wealthy, but at medieval and Renaissance banquets, elites could turn it into an extravagant display of status. Prior to industrial mining, salt was highly valuable because of its tax status and importance in preserving meat during the winter months. At wealthy banquets, the centerpiece of the head table was often an ornate silver container called the “Great Salt.” Guests were seated in relation to it according to rank: sitting close to the host, literally “above the salt,” showed that someone was highly regarded, while servants and lower-ranking guests sat “below the salt.”

Black pepper wasn’t just a spice; it was so valuable that it was treated almost like money. It grew on India’s Malabar Coast and was transported to Rome by camel caravans and monsoon winds thousands of miles away. As historian Zosimus chronicled, when the Visigoth leader Alaric besieged Rome in 408 CE, he asked for 3,000 pounds of it along with gold and silver. Pepper alongside gold and silver—that tells you just how valuable it was! Its expense made it a recognized store of value across the ancient and medieval world.

In his landmark 1825 book on food, The Physiology of Taste, French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called truffles the “diamonds of the kitchen” because a dish containing truffle instantly gained great distinction. And I get it because I love me some truffle! If I enter a restaurant and see the word “truffle” anywhere on the menu, best believe I’ll have it in front of me. Imperial Romans were fans too, serving truffles at banquets and even believing they were created when lightning struck the ground. They were also extremely difficult to cultivate, since they grow underground and traditionally had to be hunted with trained animals in wild oak forests. The “diamonds of the kitchen” moniker still feels pretty fitting today.

Oysters, the 19th-century working-class food, were a luxury item in Roman times. Juvenal mentions oysters from Britain, sent from Richborough in damp moss, as a sign of how far the Roman Empire had stretched, since live oysters did not travel well. Wealthy Romans had saltwater tanks on their seaside properties for this purpose; these are known as vivaria.

Long before chocolate became the sweet treat we know today, elites in Maya and Aztec society consumed cacao as a bitter, frothy drink spiced with ingredients such as chili, vanilla, and achiote. Cacao beans were also used as currency throughout the Aztec Empire. In fact, 16th-century Spanish chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún noted in his Florentine Codex that people spent cacao much like coins, and it was also collected as tribute, or payment owed to rulers. I’d have a hard time choosing between spending my chocolate and eating it!

Saffron was another spice once prized by the wealthy. Medieval monarchs flavored their food with it and dyed their court garments gold. Saffron comes from the stigmas of the Crocus sativus blossom. It is hand-picked during a fleeting, two-week blooming season, and approximately 75,000 blossoms are needed to make a single pound. German trade hubs like Nuremberg even established purity laws, known as Safranschau, to regulate the saffron trade. Adulteration was punished by hefty fines or even death. Yes, messing with someone’s saffron could literally cost you your life! Even where it was grown in parts of Europe, saffron’s grueling hand-harvesting kept supply small and prices high.

In 1669, Ottoman ambassador Süleyman Ağa arrived in Paris and introduced the royal court of Louis XIV to the ritual of coffee, a beverage that had been firmly established across the Ottoman Empire and was native to Ethiopia. In France, it was served in a luxury context, with silverware and porcelain, and was reserved for the elite due to hefty import taxes until the later advent of coffeehouses.

To demonstrate his mastery over the natural world, Louis XIV commissioned Jules Hardouin-Mansart to build the Versailles Orangery between 1684 and 1686 to protect sweet oranges from the inhospitable Northern European climate. With its vaulted stone galleries, the building was large enough to house over 1,000 potted citrus trees, which guaranteed a reliable source of fresh oranges to adorn royal feasts throughout the year. Ultimately, the complex served as a powerful statement about royal domination of nature.

Before industrial roller mills, making white flour required removing the bran and germ by repeatedly sifting the flour through cloth, a labor-intensive process called bolting. Bread color, then, reflected wealth. Wheat was an expensive crop that yielded less grain than rye, barley, or oats, and turning it into fine white flour required even more work. As a result, only elites could afford fine white loaves of paindemaine, or “Lord’s bread.” Peasants subsisted on dense, dark loaves made from unbolted or mixed grains.

In the days before clear, instant gelatin powder, making gelatin required hours of boiling animal parts, such as calves’ feet, pig rinds, or sturgeon bladders, then straining and clarifying the liquid with cloth and egg whites. Labor-intensive gelled preparations, like aspics and jellies, served as impressive centerpieces at noble feasts, while peasants never saw them on their tables. All that work for some fancy jelly! Recipes for these elaborate dishes appear in the medieval French cookbook Le Viandier de Taillevent, dating to around 1375.

In wealthy homes, tea was stored in fancy wooden containers called caddies (a name derived from kati, a Malay unit of weight) and kept locked away with the key solely in the possession of the mistress of the house. Tea came into Britain via the China trade and was heavily taxed as a luxury item during the 18th century, and a pound of the finest tea could cost more than a skilled worker could earn in a month.

In the Victorian and Gilded Age households, celery was highly prized because it was difficult to produce: the soil had to be mounded around the stalks by hand, preventing the stalks from turning bitter and green. They were commonly displayed in cut-crystal celery vases on the dining table, and these are now in collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But in the late 1890s, mass production techniques for celery emerged and prices plummeted.

It was in 1778 that the chef Jean-Joseph Close, an employee of the Governor of Alsace, invented Pâté de Contades: force-fed goose liver (an ancient Egyptian and Roman practice), with black truffles, baked in pastry. When the Pâté was presented to Louis XVI, the Governor of Alsace was rewarded with landholdings in Picardy. Close, on the other hand, received only 20 gold pistoles.

During Japan’s Edo period, beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, had an unusual tendency to afflict the wealthy. Samurai, urban elites, and members of the Shogun’s court could afford polished white rice, but removing the bran also removed much of the vitamin B1. The rural poor, who paid taxes in rice, often fared better because they ate unrefined brown rice, millet, and barley. For once, being able to afford the fancier food actually worked against you!

Making ice cream in 17th-century England was no simple task. The ice cream served at Charles II’s 1671 feast at Windsor Castle required ice to be harvested during winter, stored in underground ice houses, and kept frozen until it was needed. Add the cream, sugar, salt, and all that hand-churning, and it was indeed expensive to produce. A similar, but separate, legend about an earlier king, Charles I, holds that he supposedly paid a chef £500 a year not to reveal his secret ice cream recipe. I love the drama, but sadly, food historians Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir showed that story to be a Victorian myth.

Bananas were such a novelty in Victorian Britain and North America that they had to be eaten with a silver fruit knife and fork, not hands, and displayed for dining on a glass stand shaped like a boat. The 1879 etiquette guide Manners and Tone of Good Society specifically instructed diners to cut bananas with a knife and fork rather than eat them by hand. Before the early 20th century, bananas were rare and very perishable. Refrigerated steamships made them cheap.

Today, vanilla orchids can be hand-pollinated and grown far beyond Mexico, across tropical regions worldwide. But for centuries, that wasn’t possible. Vanilla was highly prized by Aztec royalty and European monarchs. Although people could grow the orchid outside its native Mexico, they couldn’t reliably pollinate it because its natural pollinators weren’t present. Then, in 1841, a 12-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius on Réunion Island developed a method for hand-pollinating vanilla using a sliver of bamboo and his thumb. He was twelve and solved a problem that had frustrated growers for centuries. I don’t think I was doing anything nearly that impressive at twelve!

This content was created with the help of AI.