I was watching a short video by Gangsta Chef, a.k.a. Thug Peach, who refers to ingredients with humerous phrases. Garlic is referred to as “vampire bullets”, vanilla is “Taylor Swift’s dance moves,” and mayonnaise is “Caucasian hot sauce.” I find the bits mildly amusing, but the Caucasian hot sauce got me to wondering when food prepared by white people got the reputation for being bland.
I’m not ever sure what’s meant by bland. Is it bland because it’s not spicy or is it bland because the flavors are dull?
Also, who the hell puts raisins in potato salad? Has anyone seen such an abomination in the wild?
Look at any mid-20th-Century American cookbook. Meat and potatoes, pork sausages, mild sauces, heavy on influence from the British Isles and the Germanic countries, and what passed for “ethnic” food was largely a limited number of southern Italian “red sauce” dishes (e.g., spaghetti and meatballs), or a limited number of bastardized Chinese dishes. Many dishes used only salt and pepper as spices, or maybe a little paprika if you were feeling adventurous.
What we now consider “spicy” food, and hot spices, was largely non-existent in mainstream American cooking back then.
There’s been a great deal of additional ethnic influences on American foods since then, but the stereotype of “food that white people eat” remains.
I think it’s a product of immigration in the Western world in the twentieth century. The contrast of spicy food from other cultures (India, Pakistan, China, etc) to traditional European cuisine is pretty stark.
There is also the preponderance of homogenized processed food in western societies compared to other cultures (historically at least). One of the funnier memes on the subject was the series of white people freaking out about finding a bay leaf in the food (with comments like “WTF is wrong with white people? You spent centuries wiping out other cultures for their spices, and now you freak out when you get a bay leaf in your Chipotle?!!”)
To the extent this stereotype is true (and it seems increasingly outmoded, what with the popularity among “white” people of hot wings and other spicy foods including Mexican and Indian cuisine), it may to some extent have correlated with both climate and improved food safety practices in developed countries. It became less necessary by the 20th century to heavily spice foods to prevent or cover up bacterial contamination.
The same fiends who add cranberries and nuts to commercially sold chicken salad.
I think it’s edifying (and funny as heck) if you watch B. Dylan Thomas’s shorts on Youtube or Tiktok as he makes dishes from the mid-central America where salads are all sugar, jello, Cool Whip and marshmallows, plus other casseroles and dishes that seem to support that POV.
But it was very regional, and the basics seem to have been settled into potluck/church social dishes, and the beginnings of the mass market pre-prepared stuff as dishes or as main ingredients in such cooking.
So, yeah, nugget of truth that was true in some times and some places, much like the complaints about British food.
Most spices come from countries with hot climates. There are peppers that can be grown further north, but they come from hot places.
I think plants in hot places spend energy making chemicals to fight off pests (fungi, bacteria, insects, vertebrates…) whereas ones that developed in colder places focus on the the basics, as they have less energy to spend.
Is there any actual evidence that spices help prevent bacterial growth? Capsaicin, for instance, is tailored to repel mammals (except for the occasional weird mammal that learns to enjoy it), not bacteria.
It’s stereotype but it’s also true in a lot of cases. I can confirm my in-laws afro Carribean food does in fact make standard American faire look bland.
One funny recent example: one of the local brewpubs around me started serving what they claimed was chicken curry. It was roast chicken with a vaguely gingery sauce drizzled on it. Of all the “white people curry” I have been served in a pub on either side of the Atlantic, it was the most “white people". We were actually considering hosting a family party in their event room. My wife joked her family would disown her if we had it there (Curry Chicken is their national dish)
It was not uncommon in Zimbabwe, my mother (and her circle of friemds) used to do it. OTOH, this was a fairly privileged group of white women, I doubt there were many Black families even eating potato salad, let alone one with raisins. The prefered starch is sadza, a very stiff cornmeal porridge.
I am not a food historian, but much can be learned about food history from James Lileks’ wonderful Gallery of Regrettable Foods. The 50s in particular typified an era of bland suburban housewives making bland dishes, many of them suffocated in Jello. I suspect it was the continual stream of immigration that finally started to give us spice and variety.
Sadza sounds delicious beyond a doubt ! I could eat bowls of it every day and never get bored with it !
The name sounds better than my description of my cornmeal mix. I’d call mine ‘a stiff swill’ but that makes mine sound like a brush I’d clean a toilet with.
That website/book by Lileks is amazing. My mother actually owned one of the books he posted about (in Mom’s case, it was the 10 P.M. Cook Book), but I recall Mom finding all sorts of blecchy similar recipes in similar books.
You’re right about the Jello, but in some cases, it was aspic. Jello is a fun dessert; aspic is just plain weird.
I should point out the rise of frozen foods, mostly vegetables. No need for fresh veg from the produce section any more, just drop those frozen peas, Brussels sprouts, carrots, lima beans, whatever, in a pot of boiling water, boil the crap out of them until they’ve lost whatever taste they had, and serve your family a tasteless side dish. Except for Brussels sprouts; those never lost their bitterness.
As I recall, when I was a kid in the 1960s, the spices in our cupboard were salt, pepper, and paprika. The paprika was used sparingly, and I doubt very much that we ever finished that McCormick’s shaker of paprika. Things like oregano, garlic, curry and chili powders and so on, were far too exotic, and had no place in our spice rack. On the rare occasions when we got exotic, it was either spaghetti with Ragu sauce and Kraft grated parmesan, or takeout pizza (wow! we get pepperoni!) or delivered Canadian-Chinese (egg rolls, sweet and sour chicken, beef with veg, fried rice. Thank goodness for those soy sauce packets.).
I’m afraid I cannot answer the question in the OP, because the “when” would have been before I was born. Obviously, I survived the “bland white diet,” but I think it was that “continual stream of immigration” that @wolfpup refers to, that really opened things up. With restaurants offering a variety of cuisines, people got more adventurous in eating (my white-born-and-raised-in-WASP-Canada Dad found that he loved Greek cuisine), and I grew to love Mexican and Thai and Szechuan.
But as a kid raised in a white household in the 1960s, I can assure you that our meals were definitely bland.
It’s dry sunny places that have the most highly flavoured herbs and spices; it’s mostly the lack of water which seems to be the factor, as it makes individual leaves more valuable to the plant (as they can’t be replaced easily). The compounds associated with flavour can sometimes help reduce water loss as well.
You can actually often increase the flavonoid production by giving herbs a slight stress, especially drought stress (which is why supermarket potted herbs don’t taste of much, they’ve been grown in ideal conditions so they look good). Same works for capsaicin; slight drought in chillies increases the heat.
While some of the better known spices are only found in tropical areas, there’s actually a load from temperate regions too, including quite a lot in Europe that used to be widely used but dropped out of use in the last few hundred years.
The Scandinavian countries are also infamous for rather bland cooking. And a lot of the upper Midwest US was settled by those folks in the latter 1800s.
Then the rise of manufactured packaged food in the early 1900s spread the relative blandness into everything white everywhere in the US.
I’ve told the story here before, but my Mom grew up in a fancy-pants WASP suburb of Chicago during & just after WWII. Another nearby burb a couple towns over was working class Italians. In high school she and some friends went to the Italian town for dinner; something exotic like spaghetti or pizza. When she got home her mother, of German / Dutch heritage, but a US-born native then aged about 60 was mystified. In my Mom’s telling: “Why would you go eat Italian food? We’re not Italian.” Her Mother simply could not comprehend the idea of eating outside your traditional birth cuisine.
To the degree that attitude was common in those days, sticking to heritage cuisine would sure be the order of the day. And for a lot of US white folks, that was Scandinavian, Baltic, Slavic, German, and British. You know, potatoes with flour gravy & boiled meat.
You just summed up my childhood family’s approach to food. “It’s not ours, why should we?”
My mother too.
My mother was terribly worried when I took the initiative and went to Greece when I was 17: “He might eat that souv-something, and probably get sick.”
Well, Mom, I quite enjoyed souvlaki. Nothing bad happened. I also enjoyed moussaka. Gosh, Greek food was tasty. Did I really have to go home to typical WASP cuisine? Boiled frozen veg, a baked potato, and cold meat from last Sunday’s roast? How bland and tasteless can you get? Gimme Greek food any day: Mom, learn how to make dolmades.
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? That’s pretty much why Western tastes changed. So many of us experienced foods elsewhere, that the bland white-folks menu had to change.
Huh. My father loved to cook other cuisines. (Which is good. He also cooked some Ashkenazi Jewish food, and i hated it. Overly sweet ground beef rolled in cabbage and then cooked to hell. Boiled fatty bits of meat. I did like his borscht.) But he did a ton of Chinese cooking. Also fancy French and Italian cooking. I inherited from him an intolerance for hot spices (capsaicin), though.
But where many Jewish families have a traditional main course for their passover seder, (pot roasted brisket with potatoes and carrots) that was the time when my father pulled out all the stops and cooked something fun. He’d usually do something for a few years, then try something else. I only had that “traditional” brisket once, at my aunt’s house.
That’s true, and a few (dill, tarragon, mint, garlic) are still widely used.
I can really only speak to England, but medieval and early modern (through the mid-1600s) cuisine was definitely not bland, if you could afford it. It wasn’t particularly “hot” (and such heat as there was came from ginger and black pepper rather than chilis), but spices were highly valued imports that were used a lot in elite cookery, and people particularly liked combining strong, contrasting flavors (see, for instance, this chicken stew with several kinds of dried fruit, thyme, cloves, mace, pepper, and verjuice (a tart juice made from unripe fruit. Probably, the only one of those ingredients that a modern cook would think of as something that “belongs” in a meat stew is the thyme!)
Something shifts around the mid- to late seventeenth century, and the elites start preferring simpler, less highly seasoned foods. I think there is some French influence involved, but cynically, I can’t help wondering if they were thinking “great, now we have this colonial empire and spices are a lot more affordable, so we have to do something else to differentiate ourselves from the commoners.” And, inevitably, those food preferences start to trickle down once again…
(None of this, BTW, had anything to do with covering the taste of spoiled food. People knew about food-borne illness, even if they didn’t know the exact mechanism, and they knew how to avoid it – use meat quickly after butchering, don’t warm over food repeatedly, don’t buy food from someone whose cookshop is filled with flies. Anyone able to afford spices would also have been able to afford good-quality, fresh meat.)