LogFAQs > #967074409

CynicalZealot posted...

I'm sorry you're too poor to afford worthwhile food. I'll pray for you.

Spice is fine, honestly. But it should be integrated into the actual meal and not added after the fact. Add it while cooking, not at the table.

Though when you cross the line from "spice as a flavor-enhancer" to "spice is literally all you taste" or "spice as an ordeal", that's when you're kind of ruining your food. If all you really want is to taste the spice or to have a painful burning sensation in your mouth, just bypass the food and down the hot sauce as a shot or something. Same effect.

Yeah. A lot of great foods are spicy without hot sauce, which is mostly vinegar. Hot sauce gives food an acidic taste that compliments fat, and the salt makes food taste more like itself. The aged ones impart delicious umami flavor too....so they hit a lot of the main taste principles.

I think spice took a lot time to catch up in a lot of the U.S. because it was associated with minorities, e.g. PoC and non-Anglo Europeans. (The idea was that the lesser people had to disguise bad meat or something...which in actuality their aversion was just based on ignorance or inexperience).

The South was the first place to really introduce spicy food into the mainstream combining African, Spanish, and French cooking. Peppers also grew better in the south. So you end up with your sweet heat sauces for pit BBQ, spicy Cajun seafood and etouff, and even bourbon. Eventually these were Integrated into the U.S. as a whole.

Germanic foods use spice mostly through mustard ..probable called Heisenf or something. German horseradish dishes can feel like self defense spray when eaten by Americans. Strangely these didn't carry over with the likes of hamburgers or frankfurters. The most mainstream spicy German food is probably the bratwurst which has a lot of spicy kick. I think the traditional spices for that wurst are paprika, black pepper, nutmeg, cayenne, and rosemary. Also they would brown peppers for it which the practice of made it over the pond.

So...all the way back to hot sauce........it became a practical and convenient way to add spices to foods you didn't cook yourself.