Spicy

imagine white people discovering flavor, it must have been a revolution for them

imagine the first cooks testing spices

Came here to post this.

Don't forget Juniper berries! Very very popular, and one of my favorites.

Ok. I have studied food history in French university.

Spice trade is much older than what you think, actually during most of medieval times, the high nobility had access to spices and were using it A LOT. The rest of the population had access to long black pepper as the "spiciest" local thing.

But it all changed when French people got fed up to deal with anglos and dutch to get spices by trading. They removed all spices but 5 from their cooking and built the "new" french cuisine, focus on improving taste with cooking methods and herbs rather than spices. It flopped at first until it became the norm under Louis XIV and such.

You're forgetting black pepper

"white people" a.k.a europeans post-roman empire, I guess, thought spices from India and China were from the Garden of Eden, in the biblical sense.

The nobility were looking for it because it made them both pious and, according to Galienic cuisine, the "fire" element of the spices were a good and noble thing.

The real revolution was to try working on taste WITHOUT spices. Other cultures think of european food as bland because their taste buds are often fucked up by the continual use of spices.

French cuisine focus on the "true taste of ingredient" and not masking the taste using other products like spices. It's harder to do but french cuisine became synonym to high cuisine, which I guess indicate the fuckers were right.

Troll or lol? Vanilla is definitely not a native Euro spice.
The OP was asking about native spices. Pepper is imported, though admittedly everybody knew about it, since Roman times.
I knew I kept forgetting some spices. Though juniper isn't a very widespread spice, at least in the South. It's one of those regional spices, sort of like mastic (another one I forgot in my initial post) being a Med area spice.

Interesting to note that even back then some herbs/spices were known to be toxic in high quantities and were used only for some recipes.
For instance woodruff and sweetgrass (yes, it grows in Europe as well) were used primarily to flavor drinks (wine/beer) rather than dishes. Woodruff had grown a reputation as being the unscrupulous winemaker's herb, since it was used to cover up bad wine.
Angelica was used mainly as a drink flavoring as well.

Got any books about all these stuff you guys wrote ITT?

Mustard? The french love that stuff.

wypipo be like the air too spicy lmao

Another one I missed, along with coriander.

Horseradish too, if talking hotter spices. Though less used in France.

Obviously I know you're shitposting but I've never understood this meme. "Traditional" European cuisine might not be very spicy but white people, particularly white American men, go absolutely fucking nuts for spicy food. If you know a few white people you know at least a few white dudes who invariably go for the spiciest option when they're eating Mexican, Chinese, Indian food.

Black people are the ones who you'll barely ever see eating spicy food, and soul food is rarely spicy at all.

Dat cuz soul food was da food slaves wuz cookin fo dey cracker wypipo slave mastuhs an dey wuz fo'ced ta eat da same bland wypipo food or worse from dey meager rations

This.

Spices were added often to mask the fact that the food was spoilt and foul tasting. As methods to preserve meat anf other foods improved, spices in Western cuisine stopped being a crutch and became a legitimate ingredient to be used every now and them.

It also explains why most of Indian is Mexican cuisine is spicy, these countries had near medieval conditions only some decades ago. Arguably, India still has.

>Spices were added often to mask the fact that the food was spoilt and foul tasting.
Yeah, no. That's a myth (and a stupid one, because spoiled food will make you sick even if you're able to choke it down somehow - yes, even if you have the iron stomach of a medieval peasant). Spices were never commonly used to cover up the taste of rotting food.

>It also explains why most of Indian is Mexican cuisine is spicy, these countries had near medieval conditions only some decades ago. Arguably, India still has.
Yeah, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the climates of India (and Indonesia etc) and Mexico are very well-suited to growing spices, and that several of the most popular spices in the world are native to those regions.

Not just that.
Some spices had started disappearing from recipes as early as the Late Middle Ages.
Ironically, people in the 14th century would've had access to more spices than those in the 16th. Grains of paradise, cubeb and long pepper had vanished from dishes by the late 1500s. This was mostly due to Arabs and Ottomans raising tariffs on spice caravans (since they controlled all routes from India and South Asia).
Also, the Galenic style of cooking (which was a sort of "food medicine" not very different from the Ayurvedic tradition) from earlier had started falling out of fashion, as the trends moved away from spicy foods towards sweeter ones (sugar became highly fashionable).
Moreover, spicy food had slowly started to be considered 'lowborn', despite the irony of spices being rather expensive (though most likely because the lower classes, especially urban merchants, had begun affording them, and aristocrats never missed an opportunity to sneer at the lowborn).

And for yet more spices I've missed in my previous posts, I have fenugreek (literally means "Greek hay" in Latin), anise and liquorice.

is right, it was never to mask the taste of rotten ingredient (if you had money for spice, you had money for fresh ingredient) but mostly to show your wealth and add a strong taste peasants couldn't have.

But then French people realise you can do that without spices, just better cooking methods.

Southern Europe uses olive oil you American pleb. Always have.

blakpipo be like bix nood

Southern Europe didn't have olives until the colombian exchange you moron

Olives are 100% old world

He said Europe, not Arabia.

Is this another Sardinia-esque shitpost?

yep and it's a shame smoked eel on toast with some horseradish/raifort and lemon is fucking great

>Olives are 100% old world

It was BLACK MOORISH traders that brought olives, cucumbers, and many spices from TIMBUKTU and Mali and well as advanced philosophy and science from the Arabs. Without that, the Greeks would have never develeped advanced civilization which led to the Renaissance (started by black scienists in fact)

Africa is old world you fucking mongoloid.

So this is the power.....of history and humanties.....whoa....

So we just sardiniapost in every thread now?

They are from South America. They were important to the Aztec civilization

>Aztecs
>South America
KYS

absolute state of Veeky Forums

Olive were domesticated in the Mediterranean at least 6000 years ago
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24499124

Indeed they did, and its what we still to this day call "old world spices". Typically, you still find them in every well stocked kitchen. As lists. Think Herbs Du Provence and Italian Spices.

More over, Europe even had an endemic species of pepper since antiquity: Long pepper (Piper longum) was used for centuries before being replace with the milder flavoured black pepper, imported from the east, that we know today. You can still buy long pepper, though its more expensive. I use it for cooking while reenacting.

No its not. Vanilla is new-world. We don't see it in Europe until the late 16thC, and we don't see it any noticeable use until the mid 17thC.

Essentially, anything that would use vanilla extract today, would use rose water/oil/extract in period.

remember that one ambassador from HRE that got butthurt over Byzantine food

flowers were often cultivated for culinary purposes

Long pepper is THE best pepper to use in a barbecue sauce btw.

great for marinades for any kind of grilled protein really.

t. chef

basically what we think of today as French food, those was what the peasant ate while the nobles and royals got to ate food with spices
it wasn't untill spices became affordable and the rich started to hate spices and went back to what the peasants ate which is what is essentially what we think of French cuisine today

Garlic, salt and pepper

>Essentially, anything that would use vanilla extract today, would use rose water/oil/extract in period.
Or either mahlab, or orange blossom water, if you were Arab.

>caviar and lobster were peasant food just 100-200 years ago

if you mean prior to 1492 but after the 500 AD. Then the food would be really ghetto. Butter, milk, beef, would all be the high class of food. Garlics and turmerics or whatever would be in that class as well. The rest ate farm vegetables or whatever game they hunted. In Europe at least.

t. boiled and salted chicken

Have you got any recommended books for the history of cuisine, like the ones you're talking about here?

And the development of the ingredients.

Hardly. If anything, spices became fewer in dishes after roughly 1550.
Recipe for 'ypocras' (the most popular digestive spiced wine in Medieval times):
>Pur fait Ypocras
>Treys unces de canell et iij unces de gyngener, spykenard de spayn le pays dun denerer, garyngale, clowes, gylofre, pocurer long, noiez mugadez, maziozame, cardomonii de chescun j quarter douce, garyne & de paradys, floer de queynel, de chescun di unce. De toutes fait powdor, & c.
There are 12 different spices in the recipe. Admittedly, this was the king's personal recipe, and even rich nobles wouldn't have been able to afford all ingredients, but they were all reasonably widely-known at the time.

I can't really imagine garlic would be that much of a high-class foodstuff, it does grow wild.

>Spices were added often to mask the fact that the food was spoilt and foul tasting
>I'm a rich merchant who can afford spices, lets eat some spoilt food

You think rich merchants buy and cook their own food?

They have servants for that.

like truffles, lobster, and gold

Wild garlic's practically a weed. It's not rare.

the same was said of lobster in the past.

>but mostly to show your wealth and add a strong taste peasants couldn't have.
What if it was just because they enjoyed the way it tasted? Why do assume the that for every noble who ever lived it was to "flaunt wealth and look down upon peasants?"

>go to Europe
>excited for dank cuisine
>everywhere on the Med delivers, superb food
>go to anywhere not on the Med
>what's your local cuisine?
>potatoes in some form

Was pretty disappointing desu senpai.

He said Europe not Africa.

Interesting fact, there was a reverse spice trade of sage from europe to the far east.

bugs.

"Europe" is a Greek word you subhuman Amerimutts

Because it was.
One of the reasons why the herb and spice mixes of Medieval times went out of fashion with the aristos was because rich commoners had started being able to afford them. Aristos needed a way to distinguish themselves from the nouveau-riche lowborn (like guildmasters and shipping magnates).
Another was Arabs and Ottomans increasing tariffs on spices during the Early Renaissance.
And yet another was Galenic medicine falling out of use. Ironically, what came after it was worse, and kept being worse until the scientific method era.

>no cumin
why live

It's great how easily you can spot american posters

Stop repeating this stupid meme. Medieval people were very aware of food poisoning and would salt, smoke or pickle foods to prevent spoiling. In fact those methods often took up more time than growing or gathering food itself.

The two are not mutually exclusive you butthurt gentry apologist. Status symbols have been important to people since the dawn of time because they command respect and reinforce a psychological component of the social order that the well-to-do need to maintain. Why the fuck else were aesthetic considerations like dyes or jewellery so expensive? Have you ever heard of sumptuary laws? Class is still important today but it was an even bigger thing in the middle ages before modern national identities and political partisanship took primacy over religion, personal allegiance and local regionalism.