A fascinating thread. Thanks for starting it
I knew a lot of the food anachronisms (potatoes in a Medieval European setting make me facepalm), and had recently learned about some of the clothing related ones. For instance, pants (of various kinds) were typically worn in association with cavalry and/or by people who rode horses a lot. The Romans only (grudgingly) adopted them later on, when cavalry became more important.
And functional side saddles for ladies were a relatively recent invention too (I want to say late 1600s).
Fireplaces are another thing that turn up in a lot of historic novels where they may not be realistic. A friend recently informed me that they didn't have typical built-in wall fireplaces in typical British homes until the late middle ages. The old-style daub-and-wattle huts had central hearths with a hole in the ceiling to let the smoke out. It must have been unpleasantly smokey inside these homes, but probably warmer than a stone fireplace at the side where most heat escaped up the chimney.
Kissing is an interesting thing. It's hard to believe that people didn't come up with it in at least some historic settings and places prior to ancient India. But then, people in some places and times probably had pretty awful breath and lots of missing teeth (though I understand ancient Egyptians were pretty big on dental care and dentists, so maybe they weren't too bad). Bad breath and missing teeth don't make for very nice kisses.
I overheard a student telling some other students in one of my classes that mouth kissing is not something people in his culture do (he was from Afghanistan, I believe), even husbands and wives. It's considered unhygenic. Think about how icky the concept of mashing mouths (and tongues) together might seem to someone who has never heard of the custom.
Baths are something I see conflicting reports on. The conventional wisdom seems to be that in Medieval Europe, people had three baths in their lives: when they were born, when they were christened, and when they died. But I've run across sources that say that's a gross exaggeration, and in fact, people did bathe in at least some times and places in the middle ages, and that some cities had bath houses (where men and women actually bathed together). I've also read that people actually got nastier in the Renaissance, in Britain at least.
I write second world fantasy, so I'm not as confined by real history as writers in historic settings (so darn it, my people can kiss, take baths, and have pockets if they want). But I do try to look at what was present and what people did at various times and places in history and why. It might make sense, actually for people not to have pockets (or for pockets, at least, to be a feature of only expensively tailored clothes) if all garments must be made by hand and pockets were annoyingly complex to sew into things.
One thing that pops up for me sometimes, though, is a word or term that references a real world place or culture that doesn't exist in a made-up world. Damask cloth, for instance, is a reference to Damascus. There is no Damascus in my fantasy world, so the damask upholstery had to go.
