
Snobbery Helped Take the Spice Out of European Cooking (2015) - Tomte
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking
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Iknown0thing
One of the best jokes I have heard is - English invaded most of the world
looking for spices and still have not figured out how to use them.

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AdmiralAsshat
I'm reminded of an exchange from Futurama:

Zoidberg: Goose liver? Fish eggs? Feh! Where's the goose? Where's the fish?

Elzar: This is what rich people eat; the garbage parts of the food.

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d--b
I am surprised by the judgmental nature of the article, as if the author sides
with the spice-ful type of cuisine, as being the “non-snob” and “delicious”
one. And that it should topple the “supremacy” (really?!) of French cuisine.

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donatj
This varies a little from my understanding I learned in school that food used
to need to be heavily spiced because it was old/rancid, and that died down as
fresh ingredients became more available.

I have to imagine that was it at least in part.

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ars
As best as I can tell this is an oft repeated myth.

The best evidence against it is that spices are expensive, if you could afford
them, you could afford fresh food.

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mirimir
But actually, that's part of TFA's argument.

As spices became less expensive, TFA argues that became popular among poorer
people. And so richer people instead came to emphasize the intrinsic flavors
of foods.

But for that to work, those foods had to be high quality, and unspoiled. So,
by TFA's argument, it was poorer people who came to use spices to mask low
quality and spoiled foods.

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cannedslime
I never got the whole "white people food is bland" meme, seems like an
American thing to me. If everything you make and eat has the same spicy curry
mix, well then isn't that kind of bland as well?

When using better raw ingredients, there is less rot and foulness to mask with
spices. Also better storage and refrigeration makes some spices have less of
practical benefit.

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atomi
These are foods of Mesoamerica
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Mesoamerica](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Mesoamerica)

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mywittyname
I've long wondered if Europeans and their descendants have evolved a more
intense affinity toward meat that other cultures have, by virtue of having a
lower population density for so much longer than Asians have -- thus, they
could "afford" a less efficient diet rich in meat.

We know that tastes are related to genetics. Most famously, is the
understanding that Asians dislike cilantro at a much higher rate than
Africans, and we know a single gene is heavily responsible for the aversion to
the specific aldehydes in cilantro.

It's not crazy to think that humans may have a "carnivorous" gene, which
controls ones love of meat.

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wil421
It wasn’t too long ago that Europeans were mostly peasants working the fields,
including my ancestors. They rarely ate meat and if they did it would be on a
holiday or very special occasion. Killing a chicken means you can’t get eggs
and it’s the same for milk producing animals like goats, sheep, or cattle. Not
to mention you couldn’t hunt on the lords land. I’d say it’s been less than
200 years since Europeans could afford to eat meat.

The article is comparing Indian food to food that was only eaten by the
European elite. I don’t think it’s an apples to apples comparison. It does
give us a history of western food as we eat it today. Lots of good food
history comes from the haute cuisine of the 1700s to early 1900s.

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mywittyname
You're thinking in hundreds of years, while I'm talking in the tens of
thousands of years.

We know that neanderthals ate a diet that consisted of 80% or more meat, while
humans had a much more varied diet. We also know that neanderthals did
contribute to European human DNA. A genetic affinity toward the taste of meat
it certainly a reasonable thesis.

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emptyfile
Tens of thousands of years? Give us proof that even 200 years ago Europeans
ate more meat than Asians as you claim.

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staticautomatic
I'm not going to wade into this petty European vs Asian pissing contest but
I'll offer that there was plenty of meat in the Viking diet (roughly
700-1100).

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walshemj
Sugar was ubiquitous in the middle ages ! I think not

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ksangeelee
The article states only that sugar was ubiquitous among the dishes of those
who could afford it, not that it was generally ubiquitous.

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walshemj
It was phenomenally expensive then the BBC did an interesting history of
sweetmaking though history.

