People think Britain doesn’t use spices. Read Mrs Beeton’s recipes from the 1800s. It’s ALL the herbs & spices - all spice, curry, chilli, cardomom, fenugreek, ginger, mace, nutmeg, pepper, saffron etc. British cooking really hasn’t changed that much if you look at it in its entirety.
ITT people believing the self-deprecating jokes white cultures have been telling about themselves are actually 100% true
Do the “white people cant herbs and spices” joke have anything to do with the colonels secret recipe and the black-guy-love-fried-chicken bit?
No, KFC isn’t what anyone would consider spicy. The black people and fried chicken thing is a separate stereotype.
It’s not that though. It’s Americans doing the same overused “joke” about UK, completely different country. You can’t self-deprecate another culture.
White Americans say the same thing about themselves - that they don’t use spice. Salt is spicy, they love mayonnaise, etc.
Well, those memes aren’t saturating the space
Funny how much the yanks bring this up to distract from their own food culture.
Nonsense. You can’t bite into an American meal without immediately tasting a wonderful selection of flavours, like:
- salt
- corn-derived sweetener
Ive had many great meals in the UK and less so in the USA
it was never about spices i think. they just wanted to sail around the world and do stupid shit
No, no it was all about subagitation and money. You know, the thing us crackers do best.
No, no it was all about subagitation and money. You know, the thing us crackers do best.
Subagitation? The fuck does unlawful intercourse have to do with this? (I had to look this goofy word up in a dictionary because it’s so unusual)
Well fack my spell checker and lack of tea. But to be fair, there was a LOT of unlawful sex involved too.
I’m wondering if they meant subjugation
What do you guys think tea is made of?
Yeah that’s definitely not matcha.
Dammit Hony, now I need to order yet another good Darjeeling Fall leaf tea…
Haha, with such a reply I might have to get one myself to try. I love tea.
Get some. There is a reason Darjeeling is often referred to as the “Champagne of Teas”.
The rest of the world thinks that Britain doesn’t use spices, what we don’t know is that for some reason, we seem to use them in our confectionery.
We really like ginger.
Ginger is tasty
I like Gingers as well.
Everyone always forgets that Chicken Tikka Masala is a British dish and one of the most popular meals in the country
The British eat so much Indian food it’s crazy. There’s a Nando’s on damn near every corner in London.
I’m assuming those are meant to be unrelated statements?
Cause Nandos is Portuguese-African fusion food
:-p My mistake.
But it’s generally spicier than beans on toast, is my point
It’s just like how in America there is a Mexican restaurant in every small shitty town.
But there’s also Mexican food in the nice towns too
And Chinese and interestingly Indian food is catching on also.
i think in germany it would be turkish food?
It’s specifically Kebabs. They cornered the market of fast-food completely. Not the regular restaurants though, those are all Vietnamese.
Nando’s is South African
South African and Portuguese fusion food.
The history is that South Africa had a lot of Portuguese immigrants during the Portuguese civil war, and that then made a whole new cuisine that’s a fusion of South Africa and Portugal.
And the owner was from that region, and brought that cuisine over to England, big hit, made a chain of it
I think they were connecting two seperate cuisines which heavily feature spices, not goving Nandos as an example of indian food.
I know that it’s mostly a joke, yet 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 delve 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.
i’m not looking it up i’m just going to pretend i know
Jesus fucking christ, there’s never a shortage of harrowing greed
i’m going back to pretending they just boofed it my version of history is happier
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?
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…
What you call Chinese comes with fries and gravy, man.
Edit:🤣🤣🤣 must’ve hit too close to the mark to piss you guys off so much that you go through and downvote every comment I’ve made.
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.
Americans absolutely do not put gravy on everything. Thats the british and canadians.
Speak for yourself. I love putting gravy on my sugary cereal
Easy now, they’ll go through and downvote every comment you’ve ever made. 🤣
You guys are hilarious. I couldn’t imagine being so confidently wrong all the time.
Not usually
WW2 rationing really messed up their culinary scene
WW2 rationing really messed up their culinary scene
What? That doesn’t make sense. Even if it was a decade of rationing, that wouldn’t completely wipe out and replace a culture’s cuisine. Just look at all the other countries that had rationing during ww2 and other wars, and their food is still flavorful.
Also this isn’t ancient history stuff, if what you said was true then we’d see that British cuisine was radically better before ww2, but it’s not the case
It’s a real effect. Wikipedia has a whole section about it in their British cuisine article. A combination of rationing continuing well after the war ended (until 1954), agricultural issues, and a bunch of other stuff put Britain in a position where even after rationing ended, the effects stayed on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_cuisine
It’s not the only reason British food has a bad reputation, but it’s part of it.
i mean, that is one effect. there’s also the fact we have way better refrigerated transport nowadays so what we view as food deserts now, that was just average. a lot of the fruit and veg came canned 70 years ago if you weren’t next to a place that grew it. those awful fruit cocktail in syrup things were damn good back then
Sure, but that ended in the 50s. They can no longer reasonably use that excuse.
Yes, however the joke originated with American military stationed in the UK in wwII and hasn’t been accurate probably since the 50s
Yeah, in the age of social media this line doesn’t work. Y’all show off your beans on toast and baked potatoes with tuna like it’s a treasure chest.
The real problem in my view is that people don’t recognise post-imperial fusion cusines as ‘legit’ British food even though the curry house is the definition of an Anglo-Indian institution. When people in Britain claim the tikka masala it’s not being twee or politically correct, rather it’s earnestly considering an immigration-originated fusion cusine as part of the wider national one.
Also even pre-20th century British food isn’t exactly bad, I’d argue it doesn’t travel amazingly in many cases but a Sunday roast in our climate is sheer perfection. Too many people expect France or Italy from a country with nothing like their climate.
a Sunday roast in our climate is sheer perfection
i’ve got some amazing roast recipes, but they’re “english” or “american” cuisine so bleh. but godsdamn are they tasty when they’re done right.
also, y’all have enough immigrants from the larger empire that claiming anglo-indian cuisine isn’t british cuisine just kind of feels racist (which is parallel to your point). how long do you have to live there before you’re british? I like the french approach. five minutes.
It’s a bit like more traditional Anglo and Celtic American foods in that respect, lots of simple shit that tastes good by itself but is generally considered basic or has had certain context stripped with time. A good example is meatloaf which in some reasons was basically whatever meat and possibly eggs you had lying around after a bit thrown together in an loaf. But then you get shit like cheese curds and it’s just deep fried cheese and it’s great.
Also you can end up with something like my ancestoral food traditions where it’s just soup, cooked meats, and weird increasingly modified trail foods. The trail foods also happen to still be cheap even with modifications, though I guess rice and chili ain’t exactly that complex.
They tried to fix it later though
I always wonder whether it’s a lingering effect of rationing,which didn’t end until the '50s.
“Culture”
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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.
Edit: Adaman islands if memory serves, fuzzy on the years no time to look up.
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).
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.
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!
Haiti basically brought France more money than all of Canada, because it produced sugar.
Garlic was also viewed as for the poors. Because peasants can just grow garlic for themselves.
wow i dont have time to research what they did. tell me what did they do?
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.
Walking down a high street in the UK. I smell loads of spices from even the shit takeaways.
curry doesn’t count.
Then burgers don’t count for Americans either then. They’re a German invention
Why not? If that is the case then American cuisine is limited to corn syrup and growth hormones.
Because including any kind of Anglo infusion cuisine would go against the narrative that food in the UK is bad.
So it is the case?
Take it a step further then. Why does Italy get modern pizza? Tomatoes are not native to Europe.
Because they send a dude over to liberate the tomato from those silly Americans that were just wasting it’s potential!
Lol. You went to Florida and only ate fast food, didn’t you?
No, because if you deny everything British that is similar to something else you must do the same for everything American. Doesn’t leave you with many options.
There’s more than one American cuisine. Southern, Northern Mexican (Cal-Mex, Tex-Mex, etc), New York (basically fusion of Jewish and Irish in a few things), American Chinese, etc.
American fast food is common, but not the whole thing.
Nope, if Britain can’t have anything similar to another culture then America can’t have anything Irish, Jewish or Mexican either.
or Mexican either.
Uh ‘Mexican’ isn’t indigenous either . . . it results from the fusion of Native American, Spanish, and French cuisines, among others.
And there isn’t a single Mexican cuisine either, there’s multiple.
I’ve got a recipe from my Ojibwa neighbor’s Grandmother for roasted grouse made with nothing more than honey, salt, and cranberries roasted in duck fat. Served with wild rice cooked with cranberries. The subtleties of the dish will blow your mind. It makes delicate Japanese dishes look like all show and no go flavor. The smokiness of the hand parched wild rice set against the tart cranberries is to die for. A meal meant for kings, (And Queens if you swing that way)!
And she can’t get enough potato klub, lefse, and lutefisk when I make those Norwegian dishes I learned from my Grandmother and Mother.
It’s like there is no accounting for food tastes.
There are some indigenous mexican peoples still around, and with that their cuisines.
A minority cause of all the invading and pillaging done by Europe and America, but they’re still around.
Latest census data: 11,800,247 self-identified Indigenous Mexicans (9.36% of the total population of Mexico)
I dated a British girl in high school. She microwave broccoli in water. No salt or seasoning. No butter. No nothing.
She took it out, drained the water and told me her dish was done.
That was the last time she made anything for us.
That doesn’t sound all that bad? Not everything needs to be salted. Broccoli in and of itself has a nice flavour, imo
I don’t know. I normally bake or sauteed my broccoli. Never heard of microwave boiled.
I think steaming it is a bit better - microwaving can be hard to get right. Mushy broccoli sucks
Roast broccoli with some oil and garlic is pretty good!
Sounds like me, except I would drink the broccoli water.
Once you reset your palette, cutting out excess salt and sugar and cheap fats, and processed foods, you learn to enjoy the taste of whole foods all on their own. Salted ourselves to taste, which is far less than processed food will add.
Yeah but… microwaved? Just switch that for an oven and we might have terms.
Microwave is brilliant for cooking broccoli. I want it fast, fresh and moist. You kill the flavour and the nutritional value by overcooking it in an oven.
You can put it in a bit of water on the stove for a few minutes and get the same result too, without overcooking it. I know microwaves are faster though, but I have a different appreciation of time I guess…
…there’s gotta be a healthy solution somewhere between industrially processed meals and plain microwave-boiled broccoli
No! If you don’t take an extreme stance on this topic, you might be seen as boring!
A toaster oven, or regular oven I guess if you’re fancy, some olive oil and a sprinkling of red chili flaked will get you done delicious roast broccoli (400°F/205°C for ~15 minutes)
Oil makes a huge difference. Or butter. Even fat drippings, like turkey gelatin from cooking one.
the biggest mistake of vegan food is that it uses too little fat in most cases, i think
because “health”. meanwhile plant oil is actually healthy
It irritates me this campaign against “seed oils,” and the fact that any real harms from those seed oils would be from chemical contamination, not the seed oil itself, and I haven’t heard a single person argue that.
Fat is very important, you need so much before your body feels full, so you overeat on a low fat diet. It got libeled by the sugar trade groups to fob off blame, quite successfully.
Meanwhile, half of sugar is fructose, and 60% of high fructose corn syrup. The remainder is glucose. Glucose is good, used in the body as is, it’s a principal ingredient in hospital iv drips for instance, fructose on the other hand has to get processed by the liver into fat first, then broken down when needed in the cells, (yes it’s more complicated that that but basically.)
But the body doesn’t recognize fructose as calories, it doesn’t contribute to a full feeling. So when they swill those soft drinks they are packing the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar in each one, getting massive caloric intake that doesn’t register on their hunger.
The fact that you think it can only be one or the other is really fucking sad.
I feel like I’m missing something, was her task not to cook the broccoli? What is meant by “dish”? It is just broccoli? Am I Bri’ish?
Anyone shit talking fish fingers is going to get a visit from me and my sledgehammer in the middle of the night. You’ve been warned!
Leave my motherfucking fish fingers out of this!!!
I have eaten fish fingers in the UK and fish sticks in the US. The UK ones are delicious. This meme is not from someone who has ever eaten them.
You, I like you.
if your fish have fingers, you might want to check your water for mutagens
Do you like fishdicks?
Fish don’t have hands. Where do the fingers come from?
Neither does mozzarella but who doesn’t love dipping fried and breaded mozzarella fingers into some marinara.
Fingers are for sticking in something, including but not limited to mouth.
… you don’t want to know
Fish fin
gers was just added on as time went by
There’s somewhere between 10 and 20 spices in the food pictured, why do you think its orange?
I mean the beans mostly get their color from the molasses and sugar but lots call for Worcestershire sauce which is going to have a bunch of stuff.
Baked beans outside North America don’t have molasses, and generally only a small amount of sugar (if any). The colour in British baked beans is from tomatoes.
Tomatoes are my favorite spice
Bean juice?
onions and tomato
Use sparingly:
Salt
Pepper
BBQ rub seasoning from ???
Onion powder
Garlic salt
Misc. dried Italian herbs you’ve owned for years
Anything else left in your pantry
sparingly
onion
garlic
Garlic and onion seasonings are measured with the heart, not the brain.
Camping advice from a feral Redneck, throw garlic and onion powder in your pack. It’ll come in good if you need a bit of oomph for your food, or you pull a me and over season the unholy amalgam of top ramen noodles and flavoring, chili, mac and cheese, and a hot dog tasted meh but the calories meant I didn’t need to eat for 30 hours so it was fine.
no. that's a little overkill, dude
bring the whole garlic braid. either braid it into your hair or wear it as a belt. you never know when you might need emergency rope.
bring green onions (not scallions) to plant along the trail so next time, you don’t have to bring onions you can just harvest them. first year, bring shallots to eat. fuck, plant the whole allium family. and some parsley, thai basil, thai chilis, you know what we’re going to need an herb garden. just try to get the same campsite every year.
BBQ rub seasoning from ???
gets color primarily from paprika. almost always
“spices”, in this context, is Obese American for " salt, butter, and bacon grease"
my dude have you ever gotten a sandwich in Ljubljana? It’s bread, salt, butter, and bacon grease. that’s it. And they’re fucking amazing. I don’t think europe has any room to criticize.
The bread in Europe isn’t drowning in sugar like American bread though
I don’t know from what American bread you’re taking about. Subway? Wonder Bread? I know one person who likes them and doesn’t eat them out of economic necessity. He just got out of the navy and we are working on training his palate on real food.
Sourdough? Tiger bread? There’s a sandwich shop I eat at just for their focaccia. Fuck I wish I was eating there now. They didn’t ímport those. Might have imported the floors.
Almost all non-artisan store bought bread in the US uses sugar in some degree to feed the yeast.
oh i’m a bread snob i eat artisan bread exclusively
my first job was right next door to this amazing bakery and it ruined bread for me. fuck. i need some broetchen.
That’s one thing that’s hard to explain to Europeans - the US has good food, some of the best in the world.
It’s just not the usual fare, and you will pay so much for it.
There’s great artisan bakeries - but here in Barcelona, every bakery has good fresh bread without additives for a euro or two right by your house. In the US, same things would take a specific car trip and cost much more.
Ha ha, that is the holy trinity.
But spices are used to disguise low quality ingredients just like the aforementioned salt, fat, and sugar. Namely garlic and onion powders, which are added for that purpose to all manner of processed foods that they aren’t elsewhere. IE italians are aghast at pizza sauce having garlic in it.
spices are used to disguise low quality ingredients
can be used to disguise low quality ingredients. high quality ingredients with high quality spices turn out amazing.
Navy beans and tomatoes are both native to the Americas, does that count?
The tragedy is that many of the spices most jealously traded for became so integral to British and international cuisine that memesters don’t even realise that they were ever unusual or expensive. I guarantee you that those baked beans have a bunch of black pepper in them and guess what… pepper don’t grow in Britain! It’s in more or less every single kitchen thanks to a global spice trade that is now forgotten. Ginger is a main flavour in many British recipes and also doesn’t grow in Britain.
But Britain was in fact not that big a player in the spice trade, being beaten by the Dutch, who got there first and had better financial backing. The British East India Company tried to make its way by raiding ships of the Dutch East India Company but after a bunch of wars eventually had to settle for less exciting endeavours - trade in cotton being a staple.
The Dutch are themselves not renowned for their food either, though it is my firm belief that every country has great food if you’re willing to look past your prejudices, and stamppot is great.
I just wish long pepper was more widely known, I can get it easily from Indian shops in the UK but it’s not so widely known or available. It’s among my favourite spices, think black pepper but way more aromatic and ‘flowery’. It was known to the Romans but fell out of favour many centuries ago in Europe.
I bought some to make some old recipes (from Tasting History, which I imagine is a not-insignificant driver of online types having long pepper…?) but had to go online. The local place I go to for spices also didn’t have lovage or savoury - tsk!
Haha guilty as charged, him and Historical Italian Cooking both introduced me to it.
One thing that’s somewhat more annoying to get hold of is Colatura di Alici, the garum-like anchovy sauce. You more of less must order it from Italy and ship internationally. Absolutely top-tier stuff though, I use it in modern dishes too. I can see why it was so popular.
Did you ever compare it with asian fish sauce (I think Thai fish sauce is most common in the west, but many other east-asian/south-east-asian countries have it)?
Yeah I once looked into getting that but gave up. I just use fish sauce you buy in an asian supermarket. He recommended this as a substitution at some point but I don’t remember if they’re supposed to taste that different.
Grains of Paradise are my archaic pepper of choice. They have a bit of tartness to them.
There’s some fantastic dutch food!
👀