Comment on Why Should I...
squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 hours 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 14 hours ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
i’m going back to pretending they just boofed it my version of history is happier
MrShankles@reddthat.com 13 hours ago
Jesus fucking christ, there’s never a shortage of harrowing greed
fonix232@fedia.io 15 hours 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 11 hours 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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
bedwyr@piefed.ca 13 hours 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.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 10 hours 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 4 hours ago
Haiti basically brought France more money than all of Canada, because it produced sugar.
tlekiteki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
wow i dont have time to research what they did. tell me what did they do?
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 15 hours 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.
JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 16 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours ago
What you call Chinese comes with fries and gravy, man.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
“Culture”
West_of_West@piefed.social 14 hours ago
I always wonder whether it’s a lingering effect of rationing,which didn’t end until the ‘50s.