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In typical British fashion, they hoard them, not because they want to spice their food, but so everyone else has to eat bland food and like it, like they do.
Homophones strike again!
Horde: Noun, “A horde of Football players ate everything I had prepped”.
Hoard: Verb, “I’ve been hoarding rice and 5.56 for when FEMA comes by”
Bonus third meaning because english is a fuck
Hoard: Noun, “The foragers came back with a hoard of edible mushrooms”
what were the british doing with all those spices anyway
Keeping them in museums, like everything else they pillaged.
Selling at markup to French of course. Some of them were ridiculously expensive like saffron was at some points costing its weight in gold.
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I mean, most dishes developed in Britan since the colonial period do contain many spices (eg British-Indian food). Traditional food pre-spices doesn’t, like most traditional food of the northern hemisphere.
From what I’ve read on culinary history, traditional foods would have been spiced heavily at the time just with local herbs and things that are absolutely everywhere on the planet like garlic and onions. Blandness is a much more recent problem caused by war rationing and mass produced processed/ready made foods that pretty much annihilated traditional cooking knowledge and warped the public’s tastes around the blandest slop possible.
Historically people would find basically any way possible to make food taste better or at least more interesting within the limits of their environment, and it’s only relatively recently that “idk just throw more salt, sugar, and fat on it and that’s all the flavor the slop needs” became the culturally dominant culinary theory.
I mean sure, I do agree. But that’s more an issue in all the western world, than specifically the UK.
Yeah, though I’ve read that it’s also true for the UK. I speculated in another comment that it could be from how urbanization and industrialization went in Europe, where people were displaced from traditional sources of spices and thrown into an environment where there weren’t really alternatives/replacements available, and the traditions have just further atrophied and been annihilated over the generations since with fast food and ready-made foods in stores catering to those atrophied tastes and just stacking more salt, sugar, and fat into things instead of going for flavor. In other places urbanization and industrialization were more abrupt and happened in a context where spice production was already industrialized, so tastes remained largely the same and their respective fast food and prepackaged food at least tried to mimic that to some extent.
I also can’t help but assume that ludicrously cheap meat was also a big factor in food becoming blander in the US, at least, because it was an excuse to be lazy and not learn to cook when someone could just throw a cheap piece of beef in a pan with maybe some salt at the most, then douse it in red corn syrup that maybe had a detectable bit of vinegar in it, and it would be palatable enough to eat even if it was bland and mediocre.
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Poor people can’t afford good taste more news at 5
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tbf the global south where the euros looted spices from is where they were endemic, and many vegg and spices still can’t be grown in europe, making them more expensive. it’s true that in recent decades it’s definitely gotten more affordable, but it’s really only been since the end of ww2. 2-3 generations isn’t long enough to develop a very rich culinary tradition
Europe has lots of its own spices and historically made very heavy use of them, particularly things that can just be grown in gardens or foraged from the woods. It’s more that the traditional culinary knowledge was gradually annihilated over the past two hundred years or so (for a variety of reasons including urbanization) and now even something like “growing a few plants to season food with” is a niche thing that only enthusiasts who are passionate about cooking do instead of just the expected normal thing for most of the population to do.
I’d probably attribute the death blow to war rationing, fast food slop, and frozen ready made food, and it’s probably down to cheap fat and sugar meaning the cheapest way to mass produce ready made slop was making it bland but greasy and overly sweet. But that’s also mimicking historical signs of wealth in European cooking, where rich people just stuffed their faces with the fattiest foods dripping with expensive sugars because those were all expensive luxuries, while the European poor were left seasoning stews with domestically grown herbs, garlic, and onions. There’s probably an interesting investigation to be made of how culinary trends went with industrialization in periphery countries and what was preserved or lost there vs what was preserved or lost in European countries, but I don’t have any knowledge in that area. Maybe later industrialization went faster and preserved more existing culinary culture, while slow industrialization annihilated it as large swathes of the population were removed from domestic sources of spices and there were no good replacements available?
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because of inequality! if we count royal treats as a culinary tradition unto itself then europe & britain do have a centuries-long relationship to spices, but most people didn’t get to eat that, so the lower class tradition is more related to what grows locally, even specific to that country. britain isn’t even that far from where olives grow but they don’t use them close to as much as medditerreans
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affordability and accessibility are absolutely meshed with tradition. most people are not formally trained in cooking or gardening, so tradition is what folk’s expectations and imaginations are moderated by.
i wouldn’t know anything outside of anglo-french cooking were it not sought out extracurricular or passed down from someone else that broke out of it
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I nean, nowadays it’s mixed anyway. I’m trying japanese cheesecake today.
Also true for fish. And sausage.
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Can you imagine being invaded by a bunch of losers from half a world away just because their food tastes boring?I still can’t believe that that’s a thing. Like just ask people to open a branch of your favorite Indian or Chinese restaurant in your country like damn. I like kimchi but I’m not going to suggest invading Korea over it.
