A Brief History Of Soybeans

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

Many years ago, Europeans visited China and there were amazed to see that people made cheese even though they did not know milk and dairy products. When they saw the soybeans, they were amazed by this plant. The Chinese wanted to combine the process of soaking and cooking soybeans, because it takes a long time to soak, because it contains many carcinogenic substances.

You can't just cook it like beans or lentils. So the clever Chinese soaked soy in cold water for a few hours, then boiled it around the clock. Interesting, isn't it? When this process was completed, soybeans could be absorbed by almost 100% of the body. But for such a long processing, larger quantities of soybeans had to be made - in the range of 80-100 kg.

The semi-finished product they received was used by the Chinese to make soy milk and cheese. The first Japanese historical reference to soybeans dates back to 712, and at the end of the 15th century soybeans spread very quickly to the territories now occupied by northern India, Indonesia, the Philippines and others.

Over time, soy has been a staple in Asian cuisine. Dishes made from soy, such as miso, tempeh, and tofu cheese had very little to do with soybeans in both appearance and taste. For this reason, the first Europeans to visit Asian countries did not mention soybeans as an agricultural crop.

In contrast, however, the next to visit China and Japan in the late 16th and early 17th centuries mentioned a special type of bean from which people made various foods. In 1665, the Spanish traveler Domingo Navares described tofu in detail as the most common dish in China.

The Chinese made milk from soybeans and then turned it into something like cheese. The table itself is tasteless, but it is wonderful with salt and herbs, he wrote.

At the end of the 17th century, soy sauce became the subject of intense trade between East and West. These events finally confirmed that the Western world accepted soybeans as a food product. The first industrial soybean plantations were made in 1804 in the former Yugoslavia, or more precisely in the city of Dubrovnik, which is now in Croatia. The people there grew soybeans both for their food and for animal feed.

During World War I, generals in Russia considered using soybeans to solve the food problem of their troops. But they could not reach it because the October Uprising broke out unexpectedly and soy was forgotten.

The second arrival of soybeans in Russia took place in the 1930s, when the state could not cope with misery and soybeans were a very good solution. From that moment on, soybeans were talked about everywhere. They were even written about in the newspapers.