A brief but accurate timeline of Food and Wine in the Pacific Northwest

by Marc Hinton author of “A History of Pacific Northwest Cuisine Mastodons to Molecular Gastronomy “

14,000 years ago near Sequim, Washington man kills a mastodon butchers and eats it.

12,000 years ago alcohol was being fermented and consumed but it would take eleven and a half millennia before alcohol would be consumed in the northwest. Somehow that just does not seem right, but we caught up in record time!

9000 years ago earth ovens (a pit in the ground used to trap heat and bake, smoke, or steam food) were created to cook camas bulbs to render them edible.

5000 years ago aquatic and fowl creatures became a staple of man’s diet because most mega fauna (large mammals) had been eaten to near extinction.

3000 years ago the Makah earn their name, translated people generous with food in the Salish language through their generous hospitality towards neighboring tribes.

500 years ago Western man began the cross-cultural contamination of Northwestern tribes by introducing potatoes and alcohol to their diet.

1827 Vitis vinifera (European wine grapes) are planted at Fort Vancouver

1847 William Meek begins Oregon’s fruit tree industry

1852 Henry Saxer opens Liberty Brewery in Portland

1866 Hume brothers begin Salmon canning on the Columbia River

1886 Ernest Reuter plants red burgundy (Pinot noir) in the Willamette Valley

1896 Frank Huber buys the Bureau Saloon renames it Huber’s

1946 Portland native James Beard hosts television’s first cooking show.

The rest is history. Enjoy!

Marc is the ‎Author of A History Of Pacific Northwest Cuisine “Mastodons to Molecular Gastronomy and the founder of www.enobytes.com