Comment on Why Should I...
squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
While I know that it’s mostly a joke, it is worth mentioning that those valuable spices were exclusively used by the rich and wealthy. Ordinary people and their food did not benefit from the spice trade at all. If you dig a little bit into culinary history and find out what the aristocrats did with (for example) extremely rare and precious nutmeg the British Empire fought wars over, you want to dig up their bones, revive them, just so that you can kill them again.
Klostein@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
MrShankles@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Jesus fucking christ, there’s never a shortage of harrowing greed
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
i’m going back to pretending they just boofed it my version of history is happier
fonix232@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
You're somewhat correct but also not.
The spice scarcity and making do without is a result of two world wars ravaging a somewhat isolated island nation. See e.g. the Irish potato famine. Some were misfortunate enough to have no food at all - and many had to live with bland, rationed food items.
Those decades were formative and a lot of that stuck around.
And to be perfectly honest... I kinda like it. I like spiced (spicy in the flavourful, not the hot sense) food too, but there's some beauty in putting together a dish of meat and potatoes where you let the flavour of the meat and potatoes come through. In some sense it's actually similar to Japanese cuisine, specifically sushi, where the focus is on the fish itself, with minor added flavours (salt from soy sauce, heat from wasabi).
squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I think the two things we mentioned are not only not excluding each other, but rather cumulative: Spices were not common before the wars and the wars further increased their scarcity for most people, essentially preventing them from becoming part of the popular cuisine in a time period when other European nations became increasingly accustomed to using them.
bedwyr@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
The limies weren’t even that big into the spice trade, it was the dutch. You mention nutmeg, nutmeg and cloves came from a certain string of small indonesian islands only. There were some english traders there, when the dutch were trying to monopolize the trade.
The dutch sent a delegation, that angered the natives that killed them. The dutch came back and exterminated the natives. Killed every single one of them, and the english and other traders there.
tlekiteki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
wow i dont have time to research what they did. tell me what did they do?
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They ate it, mostly as a status symbol. They’d carry it around with a small silver grinder to add it to their food. I’m not sure what was so bad about that, other than adding something worth a laborer’s salary for a year on your food. Also, it contains myristicin which if one consumes enough in one sitting can sort of give a high - a really bad one with hallucinations that go in for 48h - don’t try it, it can make you very sick.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
I remember reading that in today’s money sugar used to be over £100/kg. Spices probably more. No shit regular people didn’t use them much!
mattyroses@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Haiti basically brought France more money than all of Canada, because it produced sugar.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Garlic was also viewed as for the poors. Because peasants can just grow garlic for themselves.
JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I mean, that’s true, but hasn’t been the case for at least a century, so why do they still eat like the aristocrats are hoarding all the spices?
Knitwear@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We don’t. It’s a bit.
The part people forget is that we didn’t just take the spices, we took the whole cuisine and the people who could cook it.
The general British public has been eating a multicultural diet for a very, very long time. So when you see bangers and mash, rather than wonder why it isn’t spiced, consider that we’re just being retro and tomorrow we’ll have Indian and the next day Chinese and…
JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
What you call Chinese comes with fries and gravy, man.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Gravy is something Americans put on everything.
And even in Belgium, we don’t get fries with our Chinese food.
So sounds like you are projecting.
Berttheduck@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Apparently you really offended all the people who do get chips and curry sauce from the Chinese. Which always felt a bit sacrilegious to me, like these places are known for amazing rice and noodles so let’s get fried potato which we can get at basically any other food place in the UK.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“Culture”
West_of_West@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I always wonder whether it’s a lingering effect of rationing,which didn’t end until the ‘50s.