I’ve heard people say that hot spices were originally added to food to mask the flavour when food had gone off.
Does anyone know if this is true?
I’ve had a look around, and asked a few people, but all people say is something like “Yeah, it’s true - I heard it…[somewhere]”. Nobody has any actual eveidence that it is true.
Shit. This should be in GQ. :o
Moderators…help please.
Thanks.
Sorry no cite, but here’s the gist of what I heard on an NPR piece one time. If you notice, its only in hot places where spicy foods are commonly found. (After all, if you want hot food, you don’t think of Alaska.) For a long time, people thought that the reason folks in tropical countries ate spicy food was because that it made them sweat and thus would facilitate cooling. Problem is, folks sweat anyways in hot climates. What since has been discovered is that hot and spicy food has natural antibiotic properties, so it kills the nasties that are so prevalent in tropical climates. So, they didn’t add the spices to cover up the flavor of the food so much as they were to keep folks from getting sick.
Moderator’s Note: Off you go.
If you stroll down the street in Bangkok, you’ll see sidewalk food vendors with open pots of curry. I’ve been told the spiciness keeps flies away from the food.
Personally, I think it’s simply because it tastes good. Chili is literally addictive - it gives you an endorphin rush.
Well, on a rainy night in New Orleans an old waiter at the Andrew Jackson Restaurant (across the street from the Monteleon) told me that most meat spices were ment to hide the fact that the stuff was rancid.
He pointed out that the top brands (like Worcestershire and A-1) were products of the 19th century–before refrigeration. Could this be UL by waiter?
I’ve heard the theory that spices were used to cover up the taste of spoiled meat, but it’s never rang true to me. Weren’t spices some of the most expensive commodities of the time. Weren’t they why the trade routes to the Orient were opened and what prompted the discovery of the “new world”? A little googling around indicates that others have the same problem with the theory.
I did find http://www.fiery-foods.com/dave/spices.html which refers to two recent Cornell University studies on the reasons spices are used in cooking. If you’re still interested, it might be worth following up.
That study came to the conclusion that spices:
a) make food taste good
b) are good antibacterial agents to keep microbe counts down.
They discount the sweating theory, rightfully so (much easier to just sit in the shade to cool down), but also think the “cover up the taste of off-food” theory goes nowhere… they may be missing the link between this and the antibacterial idea.
How recently was it that people discovered what bacteria and microscopic things were, and what they did to us? And how long did it take for that knowledge to trickle down to the third-world peasants who came up with all these spicey dishes? - lots of people still don’t know the difference between a fungus and a bacteria, or care!
These recipes for “spicieness” were in use long before some guy in a lab coat looked up from his microscope and agar plates and said “I’ve found that cumin eliminates 80% of all bacteria - try putting it in your food”. Most likely people used spices as a means of keeping their meat (or whatever) edible and themselves healthy for a few more days than they could with none, without having any idea why or exactly how the spices helped… it just worked.
The spices probably kept relatively fresh food safer to eat, and the not-so fresh stuff that’s questionable still edible from both an antibacterial and taste/smell standpoint (so a bit of both theories). I still look and smell food that’s not-so-fresh to see if it’s still ok to eat, and do it sometimes, even with my microbial knowledge, refigeration, and resources to just get new food instead (and so do YOU :D)… so a dirt-poor villager sitting in a grass hut in the tropical heat 300 years ago would certainly eat questionable food to survive, and the spices helped them get and keep the food down and kept them parasite-free more often than not.
The linked study says that covering up rotten food smell/taste ignores that health risks of eating it; well yeah - but people don’t eat rotten food because they want the smell of curry wafting through the house tonight, they do it because there’s nothing else to eat! As I stated, people do eat questionable food all the time for many reasons (one of which is avoiding starving to death), and spices aid them in doing so, not drive them to do it.
And yes, spices did use to be some of the most expensive commodities in the world… I beleive for preciely those reasons - keeping food safe before refrigeration and all our fancey knowledge of today. It’s a lot more plausible to me that spices were in demand to keep people from getting sick and dying from food poisining than to make the kitchen smell nice or add a little variety to the menu of some scottish sheep farmer.
(But of course there were most likely a few rich royal-types who probably did pay that much just for something new)
There’s also the small point that many of the spices used seem to originate in tropical climes.
I want to nitpick the OP’s use of the word curry. “Curry” is not a spice that you add to a dish. In Indian cuisine, a “curry” is any dish that has a sauce. Chicken curry, then is any saucy preparation of chicken. Each cook uses a different combination of spices in individual preparations of chicken curry to suit his or her own taste. Just because you add something to your dish that came in a jar labelled “curry powder” or “green curry sauce” or the like doesn’t make your dish a curry unless there’s a lot of liquid in it.
If you get the chance, read the book Food in History by Reay Tannahill. In it, she descibes this ancient Roman condiment (who’s name escapes me). But basically it was a sauce made by fermenting fish parts and other tasty items. The smell and taste were just awful, but the Romans put it on everything. I guess the theory was that if you could get used to this stuff, it would mask the taste and odor of the spoiled meat products.
I want to nitpick the nitpick 
There is a spice (or herb?) known as curry leaves.
I don’t think so… As an avid food-lover, I’ve learned that acquired tastes are often the most pleasurable in the end.
Cheese that reeks so much it has to be kept outside. Smelly tofu. Natto. Why do people eat that stuff? It’s because once you get used to the “oddness” or roughness of the taste, what’s in for you is no less than a multidimensional sensual voyage in the kingdom of culinary delights. No less.
To end this decidedly OT post, I must add that I’m happy someone mentioned there is no such thing as curry spice. Unless you’re talking about murraya koenigii leaves.
My Dad used to like experimenting with food. I remember about 35 years ago we had visitors one afternoon and Dad was in the kitchen cooking up an egg-curry dish, pretty daring for a causasian in those days. He asked our guests if they liked curry (because he loved to feed people) and the man replied that he couldn’t stand the stuff. Apparently in the war they used to load up the food with curry to disguise the fact that the meat was rotten. It didn’t disguise much and he could never abide the smell of curry again.
it was called Garum; doesn’t sound all that different from the fermented fish sauces that are used in Thai cooking (or Worcester sauce, for that matter)
I once read, or heard on the radio, that Worcester sauce is indeed a direct descendant of Garum.
[hijack]
A friend of mine once told me that he had learned from the owner of an Indian restaurant in Canberra that to get different degrees of hotness you must have the correct combination of spices from the beginning. It’s no good to take a mild curry and make it hotter by just adding hot stuff to it.
[/hijack]
Yeah, I use Thai fish sauce all the time; they use it in place of table salt. It’s bascally fermented anchovies, salt, and a few other things. It’s a little nasty at first if you taste it by its self, but is rather nice after a while wih other things.
I believe I something like this in Science Times (NYT).
An additive that (in practice) encouraged people to eat rotten food would not encourage a society’s longevity.
An additive that had antibiotic properties, OTOH, would tend to be advantageous, especially in tropical climes.
So researchers lean towards the latter hypothesis.
That makes a lot of sense.
However, I have some family in Mexico and one of the things they look forward to when they travel up north is to not necessarily have to spice up their chicken when they cook it.
It’s not that Mexican chicken is rotten, but it’s often less than perfectly fresh.
You could make a simple freshness chart like this: