Spices

They covered up the smell/taste of rotting/spoiled food

No, they actually preserved them.

It is difficult for modern people to appreciate spices because they are so readily available. Plus even cheap food is loaded with various flavors and spices. Imagine if boiled vegetables and meat was all you had to look forward to, maybe with salt.

>100% organic and carefully prepared meat and veggie dishes
Know what else is 100% organic? Worms and other vermin that infested fields.

>now you can buy it cheap as fuck

Not honest to goodness, real black peppercorns you can't. It's not exactly extravagant, but it is certainly not "cheap as fuck." The best you could say is that it's not as expensive now as it was then, but guess what? So is everything else.

>Food mainly. Why? Because in the days before sanitation odds are your food tasted like literal shit
Not really, just a bit bland. Don't tell me pork and veg without spices tastes like literal shit.

>Know what else is 100% organic? Worms and other vermin that infested fields.
Hahah so today we've magically killed off rats and worms from the countryside?

>le worms xD
People either ate their food right away, or they preserved it by smoking or salting. They didn't leave it rotting somewhere on the shelf for a month.
Moreover, practically all the food they produced were fish from a nearby river, cows and pigs they themselves slaughtered, eggs from the chicken they owned, etc. They didn't strut to supermarkets to buy products imported from buttfuck Tanzania that had to be frozen three times over and stuffed chock full of artificial preservants just so they wouldn't apart during the shipment.

not really, most spices are shitty preservatives save for black pepper or chili peppers (but they didn't have those before the Exchange). Salt was your mainstay for preserving food and had been for millennia up to that point. Nitrates weren't used yet.

Mostly they were used for flavor. Imagine growing up on pea soup and pottage like most of medieval peasantry and you'll understand why they went crazy for them. They were also rare, exclusive, and humans like things that are rare and exclusive. We call these veblen goods nowadays, commodities where demand continues to rise in spite of high fluctuating prices. The high price serves as a way to broadcast your social class and this explains why the upper crust used them so regularly (along with flavor and bullshit humorism dietary recommendations, of course).

>implying fucking medieval peasantry were the ones consuming imported spices

Imagine it's 1485. You're the lord of a keep somewhere in the middle of probably nowhere. Your serfs do the work, you run the farm, everyone's happy and you're the richest fuck around.

But all that wealth only lets you have more of the same as everyone else, 'cos there's literally nothing to spend all that natural-money on. Sure you're rich but all that really means is that you get two or three or five or ten pigs instead of just one.

Wealth back then rarely translated into experimtial diversity -- more often just to more of the same.

So spices? Whooaa hot damn! Suddenly food tastes like *nothing you've ever tasted before*

>magically
No, chemically, you dumbfuck. All those pesticides you moronic hippies complain about are the reason we have vermin-free food.

>People either ate their food right away, or they preserved it by smoking or salting. They didn't leave it rotting somewhere on the shelf for a month.
I'm not talking about food going bad on the shelf, I'm talking about food going bad in the field. As in, a large percentage of every crop being lost to vermin every single season. Until the invention of pesticides. What, did you think people sprayed poison on their crops just to be dicks? I bet you did, like the mindless tool you are.

crusaders who then brought the spices back home to family.

by 1485 serfdom was becoming rare in western europe and most of your workers were paid labor.

Nigga, I appreciate spices every time I eat.

underrated

>All the vermin and bugs are gone
I am laffin. Btw bugs are a source of protein and compared to the chemical cocktail you call "food" today aren't a detriment to flavor.

>Cheap food.
>"'""organic""" food

Pick one.

except for the meds (Italian, Spanish, Greek), white people food are bland as fuck, I blame it on them getting late on the spice game

ITT: people who know fuck all about medieval diets.

*Spice trade game

>Earliest English language cookbook contains dozens of recipes involving spices
>Britain conquers an entire subcontinent to ensure supplies for demanded spices
>lololol le bland food XDXDXDXD

Nobody knows what they were used for, maybe try asking Veeky Forums they may be able to unravel this mystery.
As for their popularity, I would assume the same reason we buy shit we do not necessarily need, It was the next hit product that was marked up stupidly high, from far away lands and made your dinner parties stay trendy, people loved showing off how rich they were back then so why the fuck not?
Tl.dr: same reason you buy a good bottle of wine over a shitty cheap one when you have guests over.

>British food
you just proved my point
All those spice rich colonies and all they eat is salted junk and beans

Have you ever heard of Belarusian cuisine? It looks pretty appetizing. As does French and German (south German?)

This is true. Mesoamericans got a lot of protein from their cooked insects.

I've never seen a valid insult of British food that doesn't involve meme foods that literally nobody eats.

>Stargazy pie (ceremonial dish eaten only in one part of the country, I'd have never known about it until I saw people post it here)
>Toast sandwich (nobody does this).
>Chip butty (Lower class comfort food to survive as cheap as you can, also doesn't taste bad because it's just carbs on carbs).

>implying niggers had spices before white people

Most "black food" was invented by white people.

This. Chinese, Thai, Indian, Peruvian, Mexican, Dominican, Turkish food BTFO anything from Europe apart from the countries you mentioned.

Turkish food borrows from a lot of Balkan cuisine.
German food is delicious.
Hungarian food is god tier.
French food is the meme food for being the finest.

Variety is the spice of life.
Spice is the variety of life.
Life is the spice of variety.
Spice is the vice of mice.
Spice mice lice.
Black plauge.

If you actually use top-notch raw ingredients you don't really need much seasoning to make a tasty dish.

french is still mediterranean
eastern Europe do have more spicy food, I think its because they're closer to Asia and are influenced by them and vice versa
generally it comes down to the silk road/maritime spice trade, areas which are tradtionally part of it tend to have richer food

Whats good? foods like fried fish and pies?
British food sucks admit it

>France
>Mediterranean

The political and cultural life of France has always been centered in Northern France.

This might actually be one of the most anachronistic things I've ever seen

No, most food pre-modern people ate was not fresh meat they slaughtered themselves. For the vast majority of human history the vast majority of food was grain. And a grain based agricultural system is extremely concerned with sanitation. Fields, silos, mills and bakers are all places where grain spends a lot of time and stopping rat shit from getting mixed in was a constant battle.

Your vision of farming where every farm independently owns a few dairy cows, a bull, a dozen pigs, a full coup of chickens, and two plow horses, belongs more to Old McDonald than the Medieval period

Fried fish and pies suck?

It might not be the best but it's certainly not shit. The fact that British food has the reputation of being the worst when shit like Finnish and Icelandic food exist is stupid. And while the Dutch and Germans get a free pass despite having similar cuisines.

underrated af

Man this shit reminds me of Uncharted Waters online
Basically it's a mmojrpg where you play as sailor in the 16th to 18th centuries, and can do shit like spice trade runs to Asia back to Europe or nanban trading in Chinese markets
It was cool as fuck I swear

>For the vast majority of human history the vast majority of food was grain.

You cannot be serious

You're an idiot. The biggest STAPLE of a diet was grain. As in, the linchpin of their diet was grain. They still had plenty of vegetables and fruit, meat access depends on locality.

No
People didn't eat rotting/spoiled food because that gets you sick/kills you and people have always known this. Stop this meme.