I wasn’t sure if this was going to be more about food or general cultural musings, but i guess it’s mostly about food. So off to Cafe society.
Gotta remember - it wasn’t that long ago that what people ate in the winter/early spring was what could be preserved. Sausages and potatoes in flour gravy was what there was (by and large) in Northern Europe. Some onions and carrots, too, maybe some turnips. Pickles. Salted fish by which is meant fish mummified in salt to the point it was starting to resemble smelly wood. No one was eating fresh salad greens in January. Peas? Dried. Yes, I’m generalizing, but that’s largely what most people had.
Safe, reliable food canning didn’t happen until the early 1800’s. It increased the variety of preserved food, but it was all still preserved.
Aspic - which is an extraction of gelatin from animal bones and such - was a food of the wealthy for the most part, because they were able to hire cooks to spend the time to extract it. When commercially available gelatin became available and common enough the price came down then the middle class (and eventually lower) started using it for fancy cooking and as a status symbol. That’s the origin of a lot of the “Jello salads” and “weird” desserts of the US. Which weren’t limited to the US. One of the desserts served to the First Class passengers on the Titanic - you know, the rich people - was molded gelatin.
Some more “weirdness” came in during the post-WWII 1940’s and 1950’s when artificial was seen as modern and good
The tradition of boiling vegetables to death comes in part from the days when using human waste (night soil) to fertilize crops was a thing, when eating fresh, raw vegetables could be hazardous to your health. Having also, myself, experimented with drying my own vegetables I can say that vegetables preserved that way are going to wind up “mushy” to one degree or another no matter what you do if you use them for any sort of cooking. Mushy vegetables became the norm and what people were used to.
A lot of the blandness in “White people food” has some historical reasons for existing.
I was fortunate in that my parents, born in the Great Depression, were both willing to be a bit adventurous in regards to food and encouraged us to be the same. Then again, they both came from a large city with a mix of ethnic backgrounds which may have helped them break free of the “eat only what your birth culture eats” mindset.
It is amazing how much can change in a relatively short period of time. It wasn’t that long ago where tacos might have been exotic to a lot of Americans who weren’t living in the southwest. I grew up eating them, not a month goes by where I don’t have tacos at least once, and sometimes I eat them several times in a month, so I think of them as a regular part of my traditional birth cuisine.
I once heard someone say about the medieval world, “If you had enough money for those exotic spices you had enough money to buy fresh meat.”
Yes. My Mom’s Italian dinner and her Mom’s bemused reaction to it dates from about 1945. So about 80 years ago. And quite a busy 80 years it’s been.
Fast forwarding 20 years …
Growing up in 1960s SoCal Chinese and Mexican and Italian were fully part of local white cuisine. It’s just what we ate. At that time in my & parents’ circles Indian and southeast Asian (e.g. Thai, Vietnam, etc) cuisine were very rare. While Japanese was still seen as foreign, but readily available.
Fast forwarding to now, all of those others seem to be part of standard white American cuisine too. ISTM we’re still working on assimilating African and some central and eastern European cuisines.
At least in my part of the country. Folks in big cities with large populations from those places probably find those sorts of things much more mainstream than where I am. For us here in SOFL Caribbean cooking is the fun sorta-exotic stuff to sample. And the non-Mexican Latin food. Brazilian, Colombian, and Peruvian eateries are commonplace. And very tasty!
It’s totally natural and unremarkable how regional food is in the New World, based on where immigrants settled. Also in the US, especially in the south, proximity to Mexico created an abundance of Mexican dishes beyond what we have anywhere in Canada.
In Canada, however, immigrant settlement in Montreal combined with the French love of food created some of the finest ethnic delis and restaurants anywhere in the world. My parents lived in Montreal after I had moved out to WASP-ish Ontario, and it was always delightful when they came to visit and brought along a giant ring of authentic Montreal kielbassa and Montreal smoked meat. There was nothing like it you could buy locally – when the kielbassa was unwrapped the smoky garlicky aroma wafted through the whole house! Even today, I can only find faint approximations to it.
But I have yet to find a local source for Moishe’s heavenly chopped liver. I am not Jewish but I would cheerfully convert if it got me Moishe’s chopped liver (Moishe’s is a Montreal deli where I’ve had the privilege to dine a few times). The upscale deli Pusateri’s has had Moishe’s chopped liver on a few very rare occasions, but those occasions are indeed extremely rare.
Yeah similarly i was listening to a CD of my Dad’s that was comedy songs from his youth in Britain in 50s and 60s.
One of them was a song by a stereotypical British working class character bemoaning the fact that his wife kept feeding him this weird exotic stuff called “pasta” with weird names like “spaghetti”.
When Did Food Prepared by White People Become Synonymous With Bland?
Sorry, that was me…
Absolutely so. Convenience foods, like frozen vegetables, really took off in popularity in the U.S. (and, Canada, I’m guessing) after WWII, and that’s reflected in a lot of Lileks’ cookbooks and ads from that era.
A lot of my wife’s beloved family recipes are on index cards which she inherited from her maternal grandmother, and which I suspect originally came from women’s service magazines and food packages in the '50s and '60s: nearly all of them are based on convenience foods, and often specify things like “one 13 oz. bag of frozen green beans.” I’m sure that the recipes are based on products and sizes which were common at that time, but I’m often the one who gets sent to shop for stuff, and it’s become increasingly difficult to find some of the required ingredients for a recipe she wants to make, because some of the things either aren’t even made anymore, or aren’t stocked at our local grocery stores.
The lack of spices available to the Europeans, who also were primarily responsible for immigration to America and brought their cuisines here, is definitely the primary answer.
A secondary answer is less obvious. If bland foods that are cultural touchstones become the default norm, then spicy foods are despised invaders, brought by hated foreigners. The English famously reviled the foods from the Mediterranean nations.
Americans, in addition to always looking at the Brits, went even farther. Spicy foods were favored by Hispanics and blacks and Asians, the non-white peoples who were the most hated and feared and degraded. Anything associated with them was to be shunned.
From that came a raft of pseudoscience “proving” that spicy foods were dangerous in all ways: not nutritious, creators of illnesses, liable to provoke sexual feelings (Sylvester Graham, the food fanatic, liked to push this). By the early part of the 20th century, the combination of these and other slanders led to the halt of immigration from all non-white nations, favoring only Northern Europeans. It took decades after WWII for the pendulum to swing the other way; generations had to die off before spices could take hold.
Are we talking about badly-conceived American food? OTOH, (anecdotally) I know some Lithuanians, for example— so they are not American— who simply do not like hot chillies (I asked), and in this case they are not adventurous eaters of foreign cuisine. Their soup may have bay leaves or something in it, but habaneros are apparently not a traditional Lithuanian staple.
Definitely varies by location. Here in northern Ohio, Slavic cuisine is definitely mainstream (you can’t have a fish fry without pierogi), but South and Southeast Asian is still very definitely “ethnic” (you can get it without much difficulty, and plenty of folks like it, but you’ll only find it at places specializing in those cuisines).
No mystery why the “white foods” that bucked the blandness were called “deviled” foods.
This is all very regional, too. When we say “white food” in the US we are really talking about food from the “You betcha” states. Nearly 100 years ago, my Okie forebears brought with them an existing love of chili con carne and hatch peppers (in literally every meal) to California and instantly took to whatever Mexican cuisine they encountered here.
It didn’t help that white people created a lot of racial and ethnic insults based on what people ate. They made blandness equal to whiteness.
It think it’s funny that even to this day, a iot of white people think Puerto Rican or Cuban food is spicy. But they just got tarred with that brush because of Mexican food.