"In Europe, meat was considered the manliest, strongest component of a meal," Laudan notes, and chefs wanted it to shine. So they began cooking meat in meat-based gravies, to intensify its flavor.
Main thesis.
Interestingly enough, the European pallate has also had a dterimental effect on some oriental and african cuisines athat were historically more spicy.
That bein said, history doesn't really bear out the main thses as laid out in the headline. Spices were a very late addition to the european pallatte, and the timeline give for their retrenchment would put them at a very small proportion of the timeline of historical europe. In other words, "the spice" era was merely a short lived fad. For most of its history spices were rare and not very widespread in usage, then they were available, and then they were superseeded with other technical innovations. The technical innovation of stock based sauce is a derivative of increasing economic wealth. But the snob factor is really a poor way to phrase it. It is more true that the european pallate took the spice out of middle-eastern and north african cuisine based on the snob-factor. This makes more sense because the status of european pallate was seen as being higher than local cuisinge during the colonial and post-colonial transition peirods. That is, it was social aspiration driving the trend, not technical innovation. Its much less clear that a similar explanatory sequence works for the evolution of the euroean pallate itself.
As to what was 'known' and what was actually commonly or widespread in use, for example, seems to matter a lot. For exmaple, there are definitely regions that show early adoption of arabic culinary influence eg, moorish spain. the early days of venetian traders of the middle ages (1250), etc. And the returning soldiers from the crusades would have rbought back implicit knowledge to incorporate spices in other areas further north (1100-1300).
But it would also seem that those exceptions prove the rule--the timeframe we are talking about is either early and very geographically constrained or later and constrained to a finite window of time.
But we know that the persians and arabs had spices and that the hellenistic and roman empires had access to the spoils of war from those geographic regions.
I'll happily read anything that talks about spices, but I didn't find the article all that convincing. I sent the link to an old housemate of mine, who is working on a PhD in medieval history, and here is her response:
"pinches bridge of nose Apart from the rather random and non sensical use of 'medieval' in here? Yeh it is pretty bad.
I mean what? Do they mean medieval as 'anything at all before the year 1600'? In which case there is a significant issue because up until the thirteenth century they didn't have most spices - maybe pepper, some salt (expensive as), bay leaves, clove... but none of the better known ones. Let alone sugar! They had honey.. and fruit, all of which have complex flavour profiles. You see some things coming back the crusades (cinnamon) and the like. Also it depends on where you are, because of course Constantinople didn't have that issue. Likewise parts of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and the Middle East. Normally classic 'medieval' flavours are sweet and sour and little differentiation between savoury and sweet - beer, vinegar, nuts, pepper, hyssop and other herbs achieved the flavouring. They definitely used meat, but almost certainly most people couldn't eat that on a regular basis because it is expensive, so this makes no sense on a class scale.
French cooking also comes out of fourteenth century cooking, so load of bollocks (I have a recipe here that is almost identical to what it is today) - there is just more cream with the advent of refrigeration. Most of the stuff we associate with it today is post French revolution and the nineteenth century - I love how the idea of French cuisine seems restricted to really narrow Parisian stuff. Not to mention the humoural theory of medicine was still prevalent into the eighteenth and nineteenth century in some parts (in particular the antipodes and Canada). Protestantism had nothing to do with the price of fish. If anything it was the trading networks established from Malacca and the like, which still meant that spices were only affordable by the wealthy until much later when engineering meant ships didn't take 15 months to get there and 15 months back. Paying in blood for spices. Wars were fought over this stuff, along with tea and opium. I suspect most of our modern eating habits are blameable on the Victorians - although having said that, Queen Victoria had her own Punjabi chef to make her curries!
There also seems to be some sort of changing shift about what 'spice' means - herbs are not spices. Neither is salt and pepper. Grah. Talking about cherry picking your responses from historians!
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Those exact quotes stood out to me as well. It is obnoxious to listen to someone act as if his culture's cuisine is somehow objectively superior, almost like he doesn't recognize that people have tastes.
A dozen other blogspam variants on that article appeared in short order and here we find it echoing again.
Although the direct source is American I can't help but think that the underlying meme has something to do with the objective horribleness of British food and the ubiquity of Indian restaurants in the UK.
I'll agree with much of this - but after 8 years living in London and now in Manchester, the 'objective horribleness' of British food is now about 15-20 years out of date. Back in the day, sure - man, how my parents could tell stories when stationed over in the UK.
But now? I've had superb meals in both city and country - and there's been a big rediscovery of the roots of British cuisine. Just with better ingredients, imagination, and avoiding shudder the classic blunder of oversteaming the veggies. :)
Case in point - hit up the Bull in Highgate in London. Amazing pub, that serves top-notch food for about $15 a plate.
English food is improving but there are still some shockers to be found. Having a molten lump of cheddar cheese in a curry when you are expecting paneer (as stated on the menu) makes you wonder if the chef tries their own food.
I think your view of horrible British food is a bit out of date. British restaurants are among the top in the world and to be honest, even Pub Food beats most casual eateries in may other places in the world by now.
I agree. I also felt like the article shouldn't generalize so much about Indian food. It's perfectly possible to love south Indian cuisine (dosa, idli, vada, sambar) and not enjoy north Indian curries. And that's not even getting into the more regional cuisines.
I thought spices were to a good extent used to cover up the bad meats and vegetables --ie on the verge of spoiling. But perhaps that's overly simplistic.
Another thing is that the cuisines of the world were mostly fomented or enabled by the "sensibilities" of nobility/rulers where there was such lineage, as was the case in France, China and a few other places. For the most part, however, most national foods were derived from peasant cooking and thus are simpler, heartier and more robust.
Interestingly, that actually depends on what you call "unspoiled food".
There were no refrigerators or grossery stores then. The best you could do was salt your meat and place it in a larder.
Also, taking the meat straight off of a recently slaughtered animal happens about as often as it does today. Which is to say not that often.
The bulk of a cow, for instance, is so hard it's essentially uneatable as is unless you slow-cook it in a stew. That's part of what made ground beef so revolutionary and transformative -- women could go working instead of cooking all day. The remaining parts of the carcasse need about two weeks for enzymes to properly soften the meat. [1]
Technically, tender, tasty meat is in fact "slightly spoiled" -- in good conditions, of course.
That's a good point. Imported spices were pricy. On the other hand the courts of the royals and emperors were the ones pushing for fancier and more "refined" flavors, as I understand it.
If you believed my grade school history book, the whole Age of Discovery was driven by the desire for cheaper spices to cover up the taste of all that spoiled meat.
I am quite curious about how food was before potatoes, tomatoes and chillies were found in Americas. Based on what I know of Indian cuisine(north India Punjabi though it is one of the most popular that has been exported outside), these three ingredients are used very often. In particular, tomatoes are used pretty much everywhere for the curry.
Bangladeshi cooking uses a lot of traditional old world ingredients. Garlic, cloves, cumin, turmeric, and ginger were all available in the old world. Potatoes are common today, but traditional vegetables like tarot and radishes are too. Many dishes are made without chilli peppers, although that's certainly common now. They up the heat, but I don't think they define the flavor profile in many Bangladeshi dishes.
I recall reading (on Wikipedia?) that the potato took the place of the parsnip in Europe.
Edit:
> All they did to the parsnip was fatten it up. It's still the same earthy root fed to cows on the Isle of Guernsey, remarkably nutritious but long ago dethroned as Europe's major starchy root by the New World potato.
Every time I read something about the history of cooking, it only seems to reinforce how recent most of the mainstays of "traditional" cooking are. So, what was lost? I'd be sincerely interested in seeing a database of recipes from the "lost" European medieval cuisine this article speaks of. Western cuisine is often at it's best when it's blending influences from other cultures. Perhaps looking into the past would produce some real surprises!
You might be interested in http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/ . Though it's ostensibly Game of Thrones themed, the authors do research in old European recipe books and frequently even prepare two versions of each dish: an authentically old fashioned one, and one more suited to modern taste (and also typically much easier to make). The verdict on the "authentic" versions varies widely.
I get that people like foods with lots of spices, etc. Sometimes I do, but in general, I like food plain or just some mild flavoring with herbs and such. The joy is in the quantity of the food than strictly its flavor.
I guess that makes me an elitist snob from the days of monarchy :)
I was thinking the usage of spicy spices was correlated to the heat of the country in order to sanitize the meat you eat. (Raw meat in hot envirnoment is the recipe for food indigestion, spices mitigate that.) It's more related to bacteria risks than social factors or west/east. For example, in French cuisine, a steak tartare (raw beef) will have more spicy spices then a regular curry. I believe the whole premise of this article is just wrong.
Truly spicy food has typically been found only in the tropics ... and Korea. Chili peppers are strictly new world, but people in eg India/China used other piquant ingredients before the Portuguese introduced them. I have never seen a cogent explanation for the distribution of piquant cuisines.
Until very recently, mostly everyone has been a vegetarian so I don't believe your meat proposal is the whole story. Having said that, Indian not only differs from French food in terms of spiciness. As the article points out, Indian food has a much wider range of seemingly uncomplimentary flavors - recipes are typically a couple of dozen ingredients which is uncommon in the West.
I once read how strong spices were one of the few techniques available to keep rotting meat edible for a little longer, before the advent of refrigeration. Otherwise, it was salting, drying, etc. to keep meat edible.
India still has the largest population of vegetarians. Today, even in big cities, you will have trouble finding a house on rent if you tell land lord that you are a non vegetarian. Similarly alcohol has a very poor history in India since it was ruled by Muslims for several centuries before the British Raj. Salting and drying are indeed used, in as much as pickles involve it. But meat doesn't come onto picture at all. Spices themselves are dried and don't go bad. Extremely spicy food doesn't too. Warmer climate + fertile gangatic planes also lend themselves to widespread farming.
In contrast, Europe had to import spices and thus the common people didn't have access to spices. Cold weather also pushes people towards hunting by making farming difficult. Obvious outcome is potato, making beer from potato, eating meat, drying meat (steaks).
I have seen that hypothesis in two other comments as well, but I seriously doubt the focus on meat.
I have read before that spicy food in general is slower to spoil, because of the antibacterial properties of many spices. Especially in warm and humid climates, there is much to be said for food that you can still eat the day after cooking, without getting stomach cramps. No matter if it contains meat or not.
Barbecue sauce isn't one monolithic thing. The overly sweet, thick sauce you're thinking of is the mass market version of Kansas City style barbecue sauce, but the Carolinas, Tennessee and Texas all have distinctive sauce styles, and none of them are sweet.
Main thesis.
Interestingly enough, the European pallate has also had a dterimental effect on some oriental and african cuisines athat were historically more spicy.
That bein said, history doesn't really bear out the main thses as laid out in the headline. Spices were a very late addition to the european pallatte, and the timeline give for their retrenchment would put them at a very small proportion of the timeline of historical europe. In other words, "the spice" era was merely a short lived fad. For most of its history spices were rare and not very widespread in usage, then they were available, and then they were superseeded with other technical innovations. The technical innovation of stock based sauce is a derivative of increasing economic wealth. But the snob factor is really a poor way to phrase it. It is more true that the european pallate took the spice out of middle-eastern and north african cuisine based on the snob-factor. This makes more sense because the status of european pallate was seen as being higher than local cuisinge during the colonial and post-colonial transition peirods. That is, it was social aspiration driving the trend, not technical innovation. Its much less clear that a similar explanatory sequence works for the evolution of the euroean pallate itself.