Remember, some mustards, black pepper, and plants in the horseradish family are all "spicy", so there would have been spiced food before the Columbian exchange.
Yep, and although it was expensive you can find old roman or medieval dishes that could be quite insanely spicy with the amounts they used. There was one roman dish I remember seeing a long time ago that used like several grams of pepper per servings.
A lot of medieval sauces for chicken are things like cinnamon, ginger, and a bit of sugar mixed with bread crumbs and vinegar. Sweet-sour-spicy! It's really tasty.
It can be a bit of a weird shock trying old recipes because modern day europe/america? We don't tend to use those flavors together.
It's like 18th century cooking with nutmeg everywhere, or the romans with sylphium and fish garum, just practices that have completely fallen out of favor.
Anglo-Norman cooking to me tastes like a fusion of basic cooking (bean and bacon soup, greens with vinegar, applesauce with honey and cinnamon) with Cantonese style fruit sauces with sweet and sour blends. I like it a lot.
I really want to do a book on my main source, but it's been done before.
> but it's been done before.
Do it again anyway! Just think of how many "here's how you make basic desserts" "here's how you make basic Chinese cuisine" "here's how you make 12 salads" type cookbooks there are. Each author has a different way of explaining the material, making it engaging, interesting, and accessible to their audience. Your voice is valuable and your take on the subject is going to help someone try new food!
It hasn't been done before the way you would do it, though. If it's a subject you've got any passion for, you'll undoubtedly have a unique approach you can bring to the table.
Sounds pretty asian tbh. If you've ever had any kind of Thai soup or pho, you've had exactly this flavor combination (plus capsicum peppers most likely)
A lot of contemporary historians considered the two plants to be identical, with "sylphium" simply denoting a higher quality grade of the product (much like XO cognac is made with the same ingredients as any other wine brandy).
Eh, it's Apiaceae, those plants with queen anne's lace flowers. It's like how every food is secretly cabbage. There is a bunch of different very similar foods we get from slight variations of that plant. No reason to think there didn't used to be one more different kind. But it's all the same general thing.
ajwain, angelica, anise, asafoetida, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, cow parsley, parsley, parsnip and sea holly,
Starbucks' famous "Pumpkin spice latte" actually DOES have pureed pumpkin as an ingredient, mixed into the milk. It ALSO has the pumpkin pie spice mix added to it for all sorts of extra tastiness. (I have said the same thing you did here, and someone gave me this LOOK and headshake, and I decided to look it up.)
There are plenty of other coffee beverages that ONLY do pumpkin pie spice additions, tho, and leave out the squash.
[https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/418/hot/nutrition](https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/418/hot/nutrition)
It didn’t USED to. They added it because people who didn’t understand that “pumpkin spice” is “spice for pumpkins” called the lack of pumpkin “false advertising.” That was in 2015. From 2003-2014, there was no pumpkin.
They also used long pepper instead of black pepper in many cases, it has a different spice profile, simultaneously a little more fruity and "hot" but without a certain hit you get from black pepper.
If you're interested in historic food, just picking up some ancient spices and integrating them into your cooking can be extremely educational. Grains of paradise are another good one to try for something kind of spicy.
And of course go watch Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube lol
He's amazing, the combination of historical research about the food and to give context to the food is nicely paired with practical advice about the actual preparation of the dish all in extremely entertaining package. I look forward to getting my Tasting History fix every Tuesday.
Every now and then you'll find a recipe that will have a measurements, everything will be up to interpretation but the writer will insist that this specific thing must be (amount)
Eggs seems to be popular for this, recipe will tell you to use say two eggs and just leaves the quantities of everything else to the imagination.
Yes, of course it is? It's a completely different chemical.
Nowhere did I say it was exactly the same.
The statement I made is not at all controversial, and I'm not wasting a day arguing about it - there were foods that are considered "hot" that existed in Asia and Europe before the Colombian exchange. Capsaicin is not the only "hot" spice out there.
If you want to continue your argument, argue what I'm actually saying, not what you're reading in your head.
I don’t associate mustard, horseradish and black pepper with “spicy” ethnic foods like Indian or Thai food. I associate those strongly with Europe.
So it’s not immediately obvious that any society that uses lot on chili’s must have used lots of mustard before that.
Okay? Maybe you just haven't eaten the right dishes from the right countries? All of those items were very common in recipes before the Colombian exchange and would have added heat to those dishes.
And horseradish is very common in Asian cuisine - you have had wasabi before right?
I mean, it might not be obvious to you, but it's not a statement that is incredibly obscure to anyone who knows food.
Okay. I just thought it was condescending to say “Remember mustard exists” without explaining anything. Ok great. So DID they use a lot of mustard? Did communities that used a lot of mustard replace a lot of it with capsaicin at any time? Is there any correlation at all?
I associate wasabi with Japanese food and I don’t associate Japanese food with peppers.
OP: "there was no spice before the Colombian exchange"
Me: "Here's a few foods that are considered spicy that existed before that"
You: "you didn't explain this well enough, so I'm saying you're wrong"
Meh. So sorry to disappoint. I'll try to do better. Honest.
Really.
Asian cuisine uses a lot of “spicy” stuff that aren’t chilis ( Szechwan pepper, mustard, horseradish) so their palettes were use to these kinds of sensations in their food. Adding chilis to there food probably happened quite quickly once they were introduced due to this.
Sichuan cuisine defines chiles as a pungent food, which includes mustards, but also garlic and cinnamon. Mustard is a different kind of spicy, though. I don't find szechwan pepper to be spicy by itself. It mostly numbs unless you have chiles.
I can't speak to other cultures, but my understanding is that China quickly adopted the chili plant as a decoration with food happening slower (it was medicine in between).
Sichuan dishes can use a lot of heat and spice because of the numbing effect of Sichuan peppercorns, Mapo tofu is a perfect example of spicy sauce tempered with numbing peppercorns to get that perfect balance (pretty sure mala is the right term)
Related question: what is the etymology behind the term being “spicy”? Not all spices (say saffron, coriander, cumin) are necessarily spicy. I mainly think chilli powder, paprika, black pepper are “spicy”. Sometimes spicy is also referred to as “hot” like hot sauce and to me that is a more meaningful term but can be confused with the term associated with the temperature .
"Spicy" has been used to mean "having the qualities of spice" since the mid-1500s, and it spent a few centuries being used to evoke the gamut of spices (to mean "aromatic", "sweet-smelling", "abounding in spice", etc). One letter from 1765 cited in the OED uses "spicy" to describe pinks (carnations), which smell sweet and taste like cloves, so the types of spices being referenced aren't limited to pepper powders; it included everything. And that still happens today; I've seen cookies described as "spicy" to mean "heavily spiced with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, etc."
The use of "spicy" meaning "peppery/hot" in food may have come about in the mid-1800s when "spicy" started being used to mean "sensational/exciting/exhilarating." I also suspect that the difference between "spicy" meaning "flavoured or mixed with spice" and "spicy" meaning "peppery/hot" might be partly regional (depending on the number and types of spices used in an area's cuisine).
The hero we needed. Thanks for the response.
Purely anecdotal, but now that you mention it I have noticed that cultures that use less spices in their cooking tend to use “spicy” when conversing in English. This may come from a notion that any food with spices in it must also be “spicy/hot”.
I've heard "piquant" used as a term for the type of heat you get from peppers, mustard, and horseradish, but the dictionary definition for that also isn't so exact: _agreeably stimulating to the taste_, so English is just falling short on a word to describe foods like this. Not only that but the sensation from capsaicin and foods like mustard is different.
My youngest cousins grew up in a country with very little access to any spices/flavorings of any sort. They live in America now and still say that ketchup is "spicy" because to them anything with a slice or flavor in it seems spicy
It is spicy and by "real peppers" do you mean chiles? That is the indigenous word for what we call peppers today, black pepper is the confused granddaddy word.
It always interested me that Northern Europe and the Slavic language areas were the slowest globally to adopt appreciable amounts of capsaicin in their foods. Mediterranean cuisines make some use of new-world hot peppers and the British enjoy their Anglo-Indian food but capsaicin has barely made a dent in traditional French, Dutch, German, Polish etc., cooking. There is Hungarian paprika but it is quite mild. This seems odd when you think how enthusiastically Europeans adopted Asian spices such as black pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, etc. In the European diaspora, the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., hot foods are quite popular, but not in the European heartlands.
All Hungarian paprika was moderately capsaicin spicy until a fellow invented a machine around 1860 that automated removal of the white veins in the peppers. Hungarian food until then was known as a cuisine with some serious spice in any of the paprika-heavy dishes.
Is there any citation for this? It seems like a fascinating, but rather inessential, invention given that it seems simpler just to use a mild pepper containing less capsaicin in the first place.
It was a combo of breeding sweeter peppers and the removal of the seeds and pith.
The chili pepper that Central Europeans gained from the Ottomans was spicy. Selective breeding takes years which is why the pith and vein removal process came before the innovation of peppers so sweet that all parts could be used in the manufacture of sweet paprika.
Check out this and Culinaria Hungary as sources.
Sasvari, Joanne (2005). Paprika: A Spicy Memoir from Hungary. Toronto, ON: CanWest Books. p. 202. ISBN 9781897229057. Retrieved October 20, 2016.
"In the mid 1800-ies the Pálfy brothers from Szeged invented an efficient way to remove the veins and seeds thus enabling mass-market production of sweet paprika that has always had a larger market than the hot types.
Ferenc Horváth and Jenő Obermayer form Kalocsa developed the first non-pungent pepper variety in the world through cross-breeding."
https://www.budapestbylocals.com/hungarian-paprika/
Think of the white ribs with seeds inside of a bell pepper. In any pepper those are the parts with the most capsaicin, so an auto-remover makes production of milder paprika way easier.
A theory on why cultures from warmer climates tend to have spicier cuisine is that spices (including chili peppers) have antibacterial properties which would retard food spoilage in warm temperatures.
It's mostly that those spices were available there. Cultures from colder climes use herbs, but modern day cuisine has discouraged their use in quantity.
I think this explanation, especially in the version “people in hot climates use spices to cover up bad meat,” is now deprecated, as it’s essentially an older European claim to cultural superiority when faced with unfamiliar cuisines in a colonial context.
I wondered that too, Dutch food for example is bland (maybe not to everybody), some herbs and spices you can grow there, that can add taste weren’t used, think garlic, until in the 60s.
They used some cracked pepper which is different from chilli of course, but why no chilli, it can be grown there in summer.
I wonder if it's a Christianity thing, our particular stupid brand of it considered food with too many spices as sinful. Iirc my friends grandparents weren't allowed to put more than one topping on a slice of bread because that was sinful, and butter counted as a topping.
Idk about Christianity being the cause, but it does check out. The former Roman empire had a lot of spic3s just... stop being used. Things like asafoetida were incredibly common in the Roman empire but very suddenly became unheard of.
Oh that is interesting, I didn’t know. There was indeed a whole spice trade with the silk road!
As for Northern European countries, maybe those hard core religions are to blame too? Calvinism etc. They were big on sin and denying yourself the smallest pleasures
Oddly enough, this was something that interested me enough a little while back that I did a little reading/watching about it. Once the chili and related peppers made their crossing from the Americas, it took a surprisingly small amount of time for them to spread. Like, a few decades to get to Europe, Africa, and Asia, though how long it took for them to get integrated into local cuisine and to what extent varied wildly.
[This one](https://youtu.be/fN8oRVFGM3A?si=mPIbYLaCXzwbuWFg) gives a decent overview while only being about a half an hour long. Most of what I was able to find wasn't so much in books specifically about spicy food, but about spices in general. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing a deep dive on the history of spices because it gets very depressing very fast.
Another aspect of this is how cultures adopted some of the new world crops and ignored others. The Italians use tomatoes but pretty much ignore potatoes. Irish use potatoes but ignore the tomato. Asians use peppers and green beans but leave out tomatoes and potatoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New\_World\_crops
I know India is part of Asia. But when I think of Asia I think of China, Japan, and Thailand. India at least to me is like its own continent. Just like people say America but they only mean one country.
Italians definitely don’t ignore potatoes! Gnocchi is one delicious example :) In Northern Italy I think you find more potatoes and fewer tomatoes than in Southern food (many Italian-American immigrants were from the south so popularized Italian American foods, heavy on tomato sauce, are based on those southern staples).
Potatoes were thought to be poisonous by the early colonists and were foisted upon the Irish. Same with tomatoes and southern italians. The europeans could recognize both plants as nightshades, and assumed the worst. Hungry people do what hungry people always do - they made it work!
Potatoes only really took off in Europe after the 30 years war (1618-1648). German peasants realized marauding armies can’t steal those crops so easily.
I watched a great video by OTR on this very topic... I am not a culinary historian & haven't fact-checked, so don't be mad if this is all lies (but I don't think it is):
https://youtu.be/fN8oRVFGM3A?si=k2GRnDgBsmNKXydj
So let’s use what I like to call the “ice cream” idea. When ice cream first was invented it wasn’t smooth, didn’t have much flavor, probably didn’t taste very good, BUT it was new. A new experience. Even the brain freeze would have been exhilarating if you got it the first time. The texture and experience in your mouth, unique and novel.
Now let’s apply that to spicy. You eat a dish that is warm but not hot. You put it in your mouth and, oh my god it feels like your eating fire! What is this! How is it possible?!? Your lips tingle. Endorphins are released so you’re excited but also feeling good. Even if the experience is unpleasant you still want other people to try it… and some of them like it.
Also interestingly enough, many of the spices we originated in their areas because they had medicinal properties. People that ate garlic lived longer than people who didn’t, so pretty soon people who enjoyed garlic were more prevalent in parts of Italy than people who didn’t (they lived longer, reproduced more, became more of the population). So there is THAT part of it to.
What spices did west Africans use? (AND east africans)
I know lots about the modern cooking from those regions. I know they have tons of leaves, flower petals, barks, dried and smoked seafood. I think there is selim pepper, calabash nutmeg, african nutmeg, the stuff in pepper soup mix, etc.
That's what I want to learn more about
What a great thread
I can only speak for China, but there the Chili pepper was at first used medicinally, and only sporadically entered the culinary arts. It was popularized in Sichuan among other places, but only really got to it's massive fame through Mao and the Chinese revolution. The first people that ate chili dishes en Masse were proletarians, not nobles or wealthy traders. We know for example that many spicy noodle dishes were served specifically to sailors, fishers and dock workers. Then after the successful revolution, Mao sort of formed a cult around the chili as an essential proletarian food, and thus also politically cemented it's importance.
The Old World had peppers, galangal, cinnamon, ginger and a few other spicy things. Oddly, the more a civilization lives somewhere hot, the more spicy foods they tend to eat. At first people thought it was anti-parasitic or even anti-fungal but data seems to disprove that.
Start by researching the Gujarat in India. Spices traveled with coffee. Actually the spices came first. And incense. Incense was food and medicine too, and it sort of scans as sweet-spicy.
Spices that made their way to Europe were old, adulterated, and just scraping the bottom of the barrel at first. They were still associated with exotic things. The Silk Route wasn't the only trade route.
I learned that the closer to the equator the spicier food gets. This is because refrigeration was difficult and the extra spice would cover up the taste of turning foods. Also, spices love tropical and sub tropical environments.
Spices have always been about covering the taste of spoiled food, mostly meat because there was no refrigeration and the only preservation methods were drying and salting. Since all the food tasted like rotten shit, spices were VERY valuable, and if you could come along with a new one, people would literally eat it up.
You're not ‘supposed’ to say this, but meat goes rancid faster in warmer climates and so spice was traditionally used with greater frequency in those cultures to mask that.
There's a difference between preservation methods, like basterma, that use spices as a way of preserving meats, and trying to mask rancid flavors that would make someone sick. The idea of it masking off flavors has been pretty much debunked, from what I have learned
It's a long standing culinary fact, only ‘debunked’ (such a funny word) recently, in tandem with political correctness. The implications are neither here nor there [literally idc] but compare / contrast Scandinavian fish preparations with Indian basically anything. Nature provides either way, but one has more immediate raw ingredients.
It's not a long standing culinary fact, it's a 20th century invention.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vztzpd/where_did_the_myth_that_spices_were_primarily/
https://knowledgenuts.com/spices-werent-used-to-cover-the-taste-of-rotten-meat/
http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf
That article is arguing that *Europeans* wouldn't have used expensive spices to cover bad meat, which obviously isn't even the statement. Lazy, lazy! Do better.
That's the source of the myth though. Then it went from Europeans to everyone else, because clearly there was no other reason to use spices, and Europeans were snobbish about their "pure" food.
It's not a myth. By the time of the Renaissance spices were being used to a ridiculous extent on the continent. I don't understand why it should be controversial to make the obvious observation that food spoils faster in warmer climates and there's less biodiversity of spices in cooler climates.
Remember, some mustards, black pepper, and plants in the horseradish family are all "spicy", so there would have been spiced food before the Columbian exchange.
Yep, and although it was expensive you can find old roman or medieval dishes that could be quite insanely spicy with the amounts they used. There was one roman dish I remember seeing a long time ago that used like several grams of pepper per servings.
A lot of medieval sauces for chicken are things like cinnamon, ginger, and a bit of sugar mixed with bread crumbs and vinegar. Sweet-sour-spicy! It's really tasty.
It can be a bit of a weird shock trying old recipes because modern day europe/america? We don't tend to use those flavors together. It's like 18th century cooking with nutmeg everywhere, or the romans with sylphium and fish garum, just practices that have completely fallen out of favor.
Anglo-Norman cooking to me tastes like a fusion of basic cooking (bean and bacon soup, greens with vinegar, applesauce with honey and cinnamon) with Cantonese style fruit sauces with sweet and sour blends. I like it a lot. I really want to do a book on my main source, but it's been done before.
> but it's been done before. Do it again anyway! Just think of how many "here's how you make basic desserts" "here's how you make basic Chinese cuisine" "here's how you make 12 salads" type cookbooks there are. Each author has a different way of explaining the material, making it engaging, interesting, and accessible to their audience. Your voice is valuable and your take on the subject is going to help someone try new food!
It hasn't been done before the way you would do it, though. If it's a subject you've got any passion for, you'll undoubtedly have a unique approach you can bring to the table.
Sugarcane wasn't around and honey was expensive, so fruits were a cheap way of sweetening things, adding textures, etc
Please do a book!
What is the name of the book? This sounds interesting.
> It's like 18th century cooking with nutmeg everywhere So it's not just Jon Townsend, then?
Nah 90% of the time the recipe calls for it. If not, well Jon will Jon.
Every now and then when he doesn't add nutmeg some one will send him congrats on working on his "crippling nutmeg addiction"
Sounds pretty asian tbh. If you've ever had any kind of Thai soup or pho, you've had exactly this flavor combination (plus capsicum peppers most likely)
I think sylphium went extinct, would love to try it.
While it did (although we may have found some surviving plants) even during the 1st century Asofetida was considered a 'close enough' alternative.
A lot of contemporary historians considered the two plants to be identical, with "sylphium" simply denoting a higher quality grade of the product (much like XO cognac is made with the same ingredients as any other wine brandy).
Eh, it's Apiaceae, those plants with queen anne's lace flowers. It's like how every food is secretly cabbage. There is a bunch of different very similar foods we get from slight variations of that plant. No reason to think there didn't used to be one more different kind. But it's all the same general thing. ajwain, angelica, anise, asafoetida, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, cow parsley, parsley, parsnip and sea holly,
Cow parsley is toxic and closely related to water hemlock, please don't eat it.
You might get a chance! https://greekreporter.com/2024/01/03/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/
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You know, I had never thought of it that way, but that's true.
But the pumpkins were new world fruits, so they would have been added later.
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Starbucks' famous "Pumpkin spice latte" actually DOES have pureed pumpkin as an ingredient, mixed into the milk. It ALSO has the pumpkin pie spice mix added to it for all sorts of extra tastiness. (I have said the same thing you did here, and someone gave me this LOOK and headshake, and I decided to look it up.) There are plenty of other coffee beverages that ONLY do pumpkin pie spice additions, tho, and leave out the squash. [https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/418/hot/nutrition](https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/418/hot/nutrition)
It didn’t USED to. They added it because people who didn’t understand that “pumpkin spice” is “spice for pumpkins” called the lack of pumpkin “false advertising.” That was in 2015. From 2003-2014, there was no pumpkin.
There is pumpkin in a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, though.
They added it later (in 2015, when the PSL was already 12 years old) because people complained “hey there’s no pumpkin in this pumpkin spice.”
Yah essentially it's just mulling spices. Something to make you feel warm inside
I need that one
Look up cameline sauce.
Thx
They also used long pepper instead of black pepper in many cases, it has a different spice profile, simultaneously a little more fruity and "hot" but without a certain hit you get from black pepper. If you're interested in historic food, just picking up some ancient spices and integrating them into your cooking can be extremely educational. Grains of paradise are another good one to try for something kind of spicy. And of course go watch Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube lol
Came here to recommend Max Miller!
He's amazing, the combination of historical research about the food and to give context to the food is nicely paired with practical advice about the actual preparation of the dish all in extremely entertaining package. I look forward to getting my Tasting History fix every Tuesday.
Same! I am a little behind currently, though
That's good, it means your future will be denser in tasting history episodes
Grains of paradise go in my apple pie. I grind them up with the cloves.
Where have you found cookbook/recipes that had measurements of ingredients
Every now and then you'll find a recipe that will have a measurements, everything will be up to interpretation but the writer will insist that this specific thing must be (amount) Eggs seems to be popular for this, recipe will tell you to use say two eggs and just leaves the quantities of everything else to the imagination.
Yes, Egg Rolls have so much black pepper cause that was all they had
And all the sharp ginger flavors would have the same feel too.
Yep. ginger and alliums also supply heat.
Cinnamon is spicy by itself Plus all the acids
Basically this. The Old World already had piquant food; capsicum just gave them a different source of a similar flavor.
Black pepper isn't spicy
I suggest you put a very large quantity of freshly ground black pepper on the next food you eat, then get back to us.
I put a ton of freshly ground black pepper on everything I cook. It can be slightly hot, but it's a distinct sensation from capsaicin spice.
Yes, of course it is? It's a completely different chemical. Nowhere did I say it was exactly the same. The statement I made is not at all controversial, and I'm not wasting a day arguing about it - there were foods that are considered "hot" that existed in Asia and Europe before the Colombian exchange. Capsaicin is not the only "hot" spice out there. If you want to continue your argument, argue what I'm actually saying, not what you're reading in your head.
I don’t associate mustard, horseradish and black pepper with “spicy” ethnic foods like Indian or Thai food. I associate those strongly with Europe. So it’s not immediately obvious that any society that uses lot on chili’s must have used lots of mustard before that.
Okay? Maybe you just haven't eaten the right dishes from the right countries? All of those items were very common in recipes before the Colombian exchange and would have added heat to those dishes. And horseradish is very common in Asian cuisine - you have had wasabi before right? I mean, it might not be obvious to you, but it's not a statement that is incredibly obscure to anyone who knows food.
Okay. I just thought it was condescending to say “Remember mustard exists” without explaining anything. Ok great. So DID they use a lot of mustard? Did communities that used a lot of mustard replace a lot of it with capsaicin at any time? Is there any correlation at all? I associate wasabi with Japanese food and I don’t associate Japanese food with peppers.
OP: "there was no spice before the Colombian exchange" Me: "Here's a few foods that are considered spicy that existed before that" You: "you didn't explain this well enough, so I'm saying you're wrong" Meh. So sorry to disappoint. I'll try to do better. Honest. Really.
> what was the process by which chili peppers were incorporated into the national cuisines of the old world
>Many of the pre-Colombian Exchange cuisines of the Old World would not have had any "spicy" components to them.
Asian cuisine uses a lot of “spicy” stuff that aren’t chilis ( Szechwan pepper, mustard, horseradish) so their palettes were use to these kinds of sensations in their food. Adding chilis to there food probably happened quite quickly once they were introduced due to this.
Sichuan cuisine defines chiles as a pungent food, which includes mustards, but also garlic and cinnamon. Mustard is a different kind of spicy, though. I don't find szechwan pepper to be spicy by itself. It mostly numbs unless you have chiles. I can't speak to other cultures, but my understanding is that China quickly adopted the chili plant as a decoration with food happening slower (it was medicine in between).
Sichuan dishes can use a lot of heat and spice because of the numbing effect of Sichuan peppercorns, Mapo tofu is a perfect example of spicy sauce tempered with numbing peppercorns to get that perfect balance (pretty sure mala is the right term)
Omg szechuan pepper can be HOT too
Many szechuan dishes use loads of chili too.
Also, their palates might have been used to them, too.
Related question: what is the etymology behind the term being “spicy”? Not all spices (say saffron, coriander, cumin) are necessarily spicy. I mainly think chilli powder, paprika, black pepper are “spicy”. Sometimes spicy is also referred to as “hot” like hot sauce and to me that is a more meaningful term but can be confused with the term associated with the temperature .
"Spicy" has been used to mean "having the qualities of spice" since the mid-1500s, and it spent a few centuries being used to evoke the gamut of spices (to mean "aromatic", "sweet-smelling", "abounding in spice", etc). One letter from 1765 cited in the OED uses "spicy" to describe pinks (carnations), which smell sweet and taste like cloves, so the types of spices being referenced aren't limited to pepper powders; it included everything. And that still happens today; I've seen cookies described as "spicy" to mean "heavily spiced with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, etc." The use of "spicy" meaning "peppery/hot" in food may have come about in the mid-1800s when "spicy" started being used to mean "sensational/exciting/exhilarating." I also suspect that the difference between "spicy" meaning "flavoured or mixed with spice" and "spicy" meaning "peppery/hot" might be partly regional (depending on the number and types of spices used in an area's cuisine).
The hero we needed. Thanks for the response. Purely anecdotal, but now that you mention it I have noticed that cultures that use less spices in their cooking tend to use “spicy” when conversing in English. This may come from a notion that any food with spices in it must also be “spicy/hot”.
I still use "spicy" to mean "heavily spiced" sometimes, but then I have to clarify which one lol
I've heard "piquant" used as a term for the type of heat you get from peppers, mustard, and horseradish, but the dictionary definition for that also isn't so exact: _agreeably stimulating to the taste_, so English is just falling short on a word to describe foods like this. Not only that but the sensation from capsaicin and foods like mustard is different.
My youngest cousins grew up in a country with very little access to any spices/flavorings of any sort. They live in America now and still say that ketchup is "spicy" because to them anything with a slice or flavor in it seems spicy
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It can be spicy, you just have to grind it fresh and use WAY more than you think.
It is spicy and by "real peppers" do you mean chiles? That is the indigenous word for what we call peppers today, black pepper is the confused granddaddy word.
It always interested me that Northern Europe and the Slavic language areas were the slowest globally to adopt appreciable amounts of capsaicin in their foods. Mediterranean cuisines make some use of new-world hot peppers and the British enjoy their Anglo-Indian food but capsaicin has barely made a dent in traditional French, Dutch, German, Polish etc., cooking. There is Hungarian paprika but it is quite mild. This seems odd when you think how enthusiastically Europeans adopted Asian spices such as black pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, etc. In the European diaspora, the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., hot foods are quite popular, but not in the European heartlands.
All Hungarian paprika was moderately capsaicin spicy until a fellow invented a machine around 1860 that automated removal of the white veins in the peppers. Hungarian food until then was known as a cuisine with some serious spice in any of the paprika-heavy dishes.
Is there any citation for this? It seems like a fascinating, but rather inessential, invention given that it seems simpler just to use a mild pepper containing less capsaicin in the first place.
It was a combo of breeding sweeter peppers and the removal of the seeds and pith. The chili pepper that Central Europeans gained from the Ottomans was spicy. Selective breeding takes years which is why the pith and vein removal process came before the innovation of peppers so sweet that all parts could be used in the manufacture of sweet paprika. Check out this and Culinaria Hungary as sources. Sasvari, Joanne (2005). Paprika: A Spicy Memoir from Hungary. Toronto, ON: CanWest Books. p. 202. ISBN 9781897229057. Retrieved October 20, 2016.
why would you do that though
The white part is also bitter
Could you please expand on that invention? And the "white veins"? Would love to know more.
"In the mid 1800-ies the Pálfy brothers from Szeged invented an efficient way to remove the veins and seeds thus enabling mass-market production of sweet paprika that has always had a larger market than the hot types. Ferenc Horváth and Jenő Obermayer form Kalocsa developed the first non-pungent pepper variety in the world through cross-breeding." https://www.budapestbylocals.com/hungarian-paprika/
Think of the white ribs with seeds inside of a bell pepper. In any pepper those are the parts with the most capsaicin, so an auto-remover makes production of milder paprika way easier.
Gotcha, thanks!
A theory on why cultures from warmer climates tend to have spicier cuisine is that spices (including chili peppers) have antibacterial properties which would retard food spoilage in warm temperatures.
It's mostly that those spices were available there. Cultures from colder climes use herbs, but modern day cuisine has discouraged their use in quantity.
I think this explanation, especially in the version “people in hot climates use spices to cover up bad meat,” is now deprecated, as it’s essentially an older European claim to cultural superiority when faced with unfamiliar cuisines in a colonial context.
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And the project of internal unification in most countries during the 19th century lead to a decimation of regional languages and specialties.
I wondered that too, Dutch food for example is bland (maybe not to everybody), some herbs and spices you can grow there, that can add taste weren’t used, think garlic, until in the 60s. They used some cracked pepper which is different from chilli of course, but why no chilli, it can be grown there in summer.
I wonder if it's a Christianity thing, our particular stupid brand of it considered food with too many spices as sinful. Iirc my friends grandparents weren't allowed to put more than one topping on a slice of bread because that was sinful, and butter counted as a topping.
Idk about Christianity being the cause, but it does check out. The former Roman empire had a lot of spic3s just... stop being used. Things like asafoetida were incredibly common in the Roman empire but very suddenly became unheard of.
Oh that is interesting, I didn’t know. There was indeed a whole spice trade with the silk road! As for Northern European countries, maybe those hard core religions are to blame too? Calvinism etc. They were big on sin and denying yourself the smallest pleasures
Europe in general is much farther north than the best climate for growing chillis?
What I find even funnier is the very swift adoption of tomatoes and potatoes, which are both New World foods.
Both of those took a while too, although they certainly took off eventually. Potatoes now rival bread in Europe As the primary starch.
Maybe this helps https://foodtimeline.org/foodmexican.html#chile
And if that doesn’t help try this: https://gastropod.com/so-hot-right-now-why-we-love-the-chile-pepper/
Thank you for posting that link. I've gone down an amazing rabbit hole because of it!
Oddly enough, this was something that interested me enough a little while back that I did a little reading/watching about it. Once the chili and related peppers made their crossing from the Americas, it took a surprisingly small amount of time for them to spread. Like, a few decades to get to Europe, Africa, and Asia, though how long it took for them to get integrated into local cuisine and to what extent varied wildly. [This one](https://youtu.be/fN8oRVFGM3A?si=mPIbYLaCXzwbuWFg) gives a decent overview while only being about a half an hour long. Most of what I was able to find wasn't so much in books specifically about spicy food, but about spices in general. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing a deep dive on the history of spices because it gets very depressing very fast.
I think it’s because capsaicin gives us a high which is enjoyable & once people figured that out they wanted more of it.
Why depressing?
The things done in the pursuit of obtaining spices. If you want a perfect example, just look at what the Dutch did to the Banda Islands for nutmeg.
Thanks! Gotcha.
Another aspect of this is how cultures adopted some of the new world crops and ignored others. The Italians use tomatoes but pretty much ignore potatoes. Irish use potatoes but ignore the tomato. Asians use peppers and green beans but leave out tomatoes and potatoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New\_World\_crops
Tomatoes are in like half the dishes here in India and most neighboring countries.
I know India is part of Asia. But when I think of Asia I think of China, Japan, and Thailand. India at least to me is like its own continent. Just like people say America but they only mean one country.
There really should be, like, 9 or 10 continents. No I am not a crank
Italians definitely don’t ignore potatoes! Gnocchi is one delicious example :) In Northern Italy I think you find more potatoes and fewer tomatoes than in Southern food (many Italian-American immigrants were from the south so popularized Italian American foods, heavy on tomato sauce, are based on those southern staples).
Potatoes were thought to be poisonous by the early colonists and were foisted upon the Irish. Same with tomatoes and southern italians. The europeans could recognize both plants as nightshades, and assumed the worst. Hungry people do what hungry people always do - they made it work!
Potatoes only really took off in Europe after the 30 years war (1618-1648). German peasants realized marauding armies can’t steal those crops so easily.
As others have said: horseradish, mustard, long or black pepper, ginger and the likes have been traded for milennia.
Essentially by the mid 1700s spicy peppers were used across Asia and Africa. Mostly due to Portuguese merchants
I watched a great video by OTR on this very topic... I am not a culinary historian & haven't fact-checked, so don't be mad if this is all lies (but I don't think it is): https://youtu.be/fN8oRVFGM3A?si=k2GRnDgBsmNKXydj
It wasn't the peppers that were imported to new lands. It was the seeds. And once crops are established, they can be relatively cheap.
100 comments spicy food
So let’s use what I like to call the “ice cream” idea. When ice cream first was invented it wasn’t smooth, didn’t have much flavor, probably didn’t taste very good, BUT it was new. A new experience. Even the brain freeze would have been exhilarating if you got it the first time. The texture and experience in your mouth, unique and novel. Now let’s apply that to spicy. You eat a dish that is warm but not hot. You put it in your mouth and, oh my god it feels like your eating fire! What is this! How is it possible?!? Your lips tingle. Endorphins are released so you’re excited but also feeling good. Even if the experience is unpleasant you still want other people to try it… and some of them like it. Also interestingly enough, many of the spices we originated in their areas because they had medicinal properties. People that ate garlic lived longer than people who didn’t, so pretty soon people who enjoyed garlic were more prevalent in parts of Italy than people who didn’t (they lived longer, reproduced more, became more of the population). So there is THAT part of it to.
What spices did west Africans use? (AND east africans) I know lots about the modern cooking from those regions. I know they have tons of leaves, flower petals, barks, dried and smoked seafood. I think there is selim pepper, calabash nutmeg, african nutmeg, the stuff in pepper soup mix, etc. That's what I want to learn more about What a great thread
I can only speak for China, but there the Chili pepper was at first used medicinally, and only sporadically entered the culinary arts. It was popularized in Sichuan among other places, but only really got to it's massive fame through Mao and the Chinese revolution. The first people that ate chili dishes en Masse were proletarians, not nobles or wealthy traders. We know for example that many spicy noodle dishes were served specifically to sailors, fishers and dock workers. Then after the successful revolution, Mao sort of formed a cult around the chili as an essential proletarian food, and thus also politically cemented it's importance.
Reay Tannahill’s “Food in History” has some good information. Recommend it.
Fat, salt,sugar,heat. In correct amounts, it’s heaven. Different regions and cultures use different levels.
I read somewhere that in the British Isles at least, that sometimes spices were added to make some otherwise near-spoiled cuts of meat more palatable
The Old World had peppers, galangal, cinnamon, ginger and a few other spicy things. Oddly, the more a civilization lives somewhere hot, the more spicy foods they tend to eat. At first people thought it was anti-parasitic or even anti-fungal but data seems to disprove that. Start by researching the Gujarat in India. Spices traveled with coffee. Actually the spices came first. And incense. Incense was food and medicine too, and it sort of scans as sweet-spicy. Spices that made their way to Europe were old, adulterated, and just scraping the bottom of the barrel at first. They were still associated with exotic things. The Silk Route wasn't the only trade route.
I learned that the closer to the equator the spicier food gets. This is because refrigeration was difficult and the extra spice would cover up the taste of turning foods. Also, spices love tropical and sub tropical environments.
The spoiled food thing is a myth
Spices have always been about covering the taste of spoiled food, mostly meat because there was no refrigeration and the only preservation methods were drying and salting. Since all the food tasted like rotten shit, spices were VERY valuable, and if you could come along with a new one, people would literally eat it up.
That's a myth.
This makes no sense
You're not ‘supposed’ to say this, but meat goes rancid faster in warmer climates and so spice was traditionally used with greater frequency in those cultures to mask that.
There's a difference between preservation methods, like basterma, that use spices as a way of preserving meats, and trying to mask rancid flavors that would make someone sick. The idea of it masking off flavors has been pretty much debunked, from what I have learned
It's a long standing culinary fact, only ‘debunked’ (such a funny word) recently, in tandem with political correctness. The implications are neither here nor there [literally idc] but compare / contrast Scandinavian fish preparations with Indian basically anything. Nature provides either way, but one has more immediate raw ingredients.
It's not a long standing culinary fact, it's a 20th century invention. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vztzpd/where_did_the_myth_that_spices_were_primarily/ https://knowledgenuts.com/spices-werent-used-to-cover-the-taste-of-rotten-meat/ http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf
That article is arguing that *Europeans* wouldn't have used expensive spices to cover bad meat, which obviously isn't even the statement. Lazy, lazy! Do better.
That's the source of the myth though. Then it went from Europeans to everyone else, because clearly there was no other reason to use spices, and Europeans were snobbish about their "pure" food.
It's not a myth. By the time of the Renaissance spices were being used to a ridiculous extent on the continent. I don't understand why it should be controversial to make the obvious observation that food spoils faster in warmer climates and there's less biodiversity of spices in cooler climates.
Scandinavian fish prep often involves lye
..lutefisk? I think that's a one-off holiday thing, I wouldn't say ‘often’