Egg nog

I have noticed before - for example at reference 1 - how advertisements in the Financial Times and the New York Times seem to come in blocks, runs or series.

And I have be seeing a great deal of the one snapped above. Clicking it reveals that it is something called 'Shakshuka with Feta', a dish from the Mahgreb, roughly northwest Africa. The dish is well known to the Internet and appears to be founded on eggs cooked in a tomato sauce. So presumably not an ancient dish, as tomatoes would not have been common there until at least the 17th century. Or did they come in with the European colonisers rather later on?

Obviously something for Bard, with the first half of his answer being:

'Tomatoes are thought to have arrived in the Maghreb region (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania) in the early 16th century, most likely brought by Spanish or Portuguese traders. The first written record of tomatoes in the Maghreb is from a Moroccan cookbook from 1520.

The Spanish and Portuguese had brought tomatoes back from the Americas, where they were originally domesticated. However, tomatoes were initially met with suspicion in the Maghreb, as they were thought to be poisonous. It took some time for people to accept tomatoes as a food, and they were not widely cultivated until the 18th century.

Today, tomatoes are an important part of the Maghreb diet, and they are used in a variety of dishes, including soups, stews, salads, and sauces. They are also a popular export crop from the region...'.

So both earlier and later than I had guessed. The bad news is that it is getting more and more tempting not to check answers to questions of this sort. But hopefully I will get around to it later.

PS 1: I did get around to some checking later, a checking which was confused by the keyboard on the laptop I was using playing up, with keys going missing. But I was able to turn up reference 3 which told a similar, but different story about the tomatoes. Furthermore, it so happens that the Spanish tomato festival mentioned there - La Tomatina Buñol - had featured in the newspapers that very day. So I suspect Bard, once again, of having been a bit creative. Maybe they are going to have to teach Bard to provide proper references, in the way of Wikipedia, so that we can learn to trust him - or not - as the case may be. 

Alternatively, maybe one should stick to questions the answers to which are self-checking. If you ask him to knock out some blank verse about tomatoes in Shakespearean pentameters, you can judge the quality for yourself. There is nothing to check. Similarly, if you ask him to write a letter of application for some job that you are interested in. So this morning, he was happy enough to do something for 'can you write me a letter of application for the post of chief information officer at the tomato marketing board'. And as a place to start, his effort would have served well enough.

PS 2: Friday morning: Google fails to turn up any Moroccan cookbook from 1520. He does however find some very old cookbooks from Bagdad. While Bard, when I repeated the question about tomatoes, gave me an abbreviated version of the story he had given me the night before. No second thoughts of significance.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/advertisements.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghreb.

Reference 3a: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/tomato-history.

Reference 3b: A Cultural History Of Tomatoes: You say tomato, I say tomato. Have I made this joke before - Thomas Moore Devlin - 2019.