I just made some dinner and was thinking about how salt and spices[1] now are dirt cheap, but throughout history they were precious and expensive. I did some digging and apparently low and middle class people didn’t even really have access to spices. It was more for the wealthy.
Salt was important mainly to preserve food. They didn’t have fridges back then! So even poor people usually had some amount of salt to preserve small quantities of food, but they had to be smart about how they allocated it.
In researching this I came to realize that throughout history, food was usually pretty gross. Meats were partially spoiled, fats went rancid, grains were moldy. This would often cause digestive problems. Food poisoning was a part of life.
Could you imagine! That must have been terrible!
Meanwhile, today, not only is it cheap to access food that is safe to eat, it’s cheap to use basically as much salt and spices as you want. Fry up some potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and spices. Throw together some beans and rice. Incorporate a cheap acid if you’re feeling fancy—maybe some malt vinegar with the potatoes or white vinegar with the beans and rice. It’s delicious!
I suppose there are tons of examples of how good we have it today, and how bad people had it throughout history. I like thinking about this sort of thing though. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think I feel some sort of obligation. An obligation to view these sorts of things as they actually are rather than how they compare to the Joneses, and to appreciate when I truly do have it good.
It feels weird to say the phrase “salt and spices”. It feels like it’s an error and that I meant to say “salt and pepper”. Maybe there’s a more elegant way of saying “salt and spices”, but it of course isn’t an error.
It makes me think back to something I heard about “salt and pepper”, maybe in the book How To Taste. We often think of them as going together and being on equal footing. They aren’t on equal footing though, and they don’t always have to go together. Salt is much more important. Most dishes need salt. Pepper is much more optional. Really, pepper is a spice, and the question is 1) if you want to add spice to your dish and 2) if so, what spice. You might not want to add spice, and if you do want to add spice, pepper might not be the spice you want to add. So maybe “salt and spices” should be a phrase that is used more often than “salt and pepper”.
I read something a while back (wish I remembered the source) about how the rotten meat thing is sort-of less gross than you’re thinking, since fermented meat can taste good if you do it right (think: sausage and aged steak), and presumably ancient people weren’t constantly sick.
presumably ancient people weren’t constantly sick.
I think you presume incorrectly. People in primitive cultures spend a lot of time with digestive issues and it’s a major cause of discomfort, illness, and death.
I have a theory that the contemporary practice of curry with rice represents a counterfeit yearning for high meat with maggots. I wonder if high meat has what our gut biomes are missing.
That seems plausible. There’s also hedonic adaptation stuff. Things that seem gross to us might have been fine to people in earlier eras. Although Claude claims that having said all of this, people still often found their food to be gross.
I read that this “spoiled meat” story is pretty overblown. And it doesn’t pass the sniff test either. Most meat was probably eaten right after slaughter, because why wouldn’t you?
Also herbs must have been cheaply available. I also recently learned that every household in medieval Europe had a mother of vinegar.
In the Odyssey, every time they eat meat, the slaughter happens right beforehand. There were (are?) African herding tribes who consume blood from their living livestock rather than slaughtering it for meat. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest dried their salmon for later in the year.
Spices is probably too general and all-encompassing to say that spices are now dirt cheap. While, as is true to this day, the wealthy have better access to spices and other garnishes (saffron and truffles aren’t exactly dirt cheap today) but even in Roman times the use of “spices” was not in itself a signifier of class (perhaps more important is which spices). Now in case you think that literary evidence in the form of cookbooks doesn’t provide a broad cross-section of the average Roman Diet, then perhaps you’d be interested in recent analysis of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum sewers which show not only that most of the food was made from local ingredients (with the exception of Egyptian Grain, North African dates and Indian Pepper) but also the presence of bay, cumin, mallow from a non-elite apartment complex.
And let’s not forget how easily things go the other way, Lobster was often seen as a poorman’s food, most archeological sits of early human settlements will find a pile of oyster or similar shellfish garbage dumps—it often being the easiest source of food.
In my kitchen, I don’t give any special priority to salt and pepper, they’re just two seasonings among many. My most-used seasoning is probably garlic powder.
How come no special priority to salt? From what I understand getting the salt level right is essential (“salt to taste”). Doing so makes a dish taste “right” and it brings out the flavors of the other ingredients, making them taste more like themself, and not necessarily making the dish taste saltier in too noticeable a way.
I don’t salt most food because excess sodium is unhealthy and it’s pretty easy to exceed the recommended dose. IIRC the healthiest dose is 1500–2000 mg and most people eat more like twice that much.
To my knowledge, sodium is the only seasoning that commonly causes health problems. All other seasonings are nutritious or at worst neutral. In fact I think this distinction justifies use of the phrase “salt and spices” as meaning “[the unhealthy seasoning] and [the healthy seasonings]”.
I often add soy sauce to food (which has a lot of sodium) and eat foods that already contain salt (like imitation meat or tortilla chips or salted nuts). I rarely add salt to foods.
I don’t think I lose much by not salting food. Many people way over-salt their food to my taste. (I remember when I used to eat at my university’s dining hall, about 1 in 5 dishes were borderline inedible due to too much salt.)
I took a cooking class once. The instructor’s take on this was that yes, people do have too much sodium. But that is largely because processed food and food at restaurants has crazy amounts of sodium. Salting food that you cook at home is totally fine and is really hard to overdo in terms of health impact.
In fact, she called it out as a common failure mode where home cooks are afraid to use too much salt in their food. Not only is doing so ok, but even if it wasn’t, by making your food taste better, it might motivate you to eat at home more and on balance lower your total sodium intake.
Related to that, I’ve noticed that “external” salt tastes way saltier per mg of sodium than “internal” salt. Taking a sample of two items from my kitchen:
Gardein crispy chick’n has 2.0 mg sodium per calorie, and doesn’t taste salty at all to me
Mission tortilla chips have 0.7 mg sodium per calorie, and taste significantly salty
Hm, maybe. I feel like sometimes “seasoning” can refer to “salt and spices” but in other contexts, like the first sentence of my OP, it moreso points to spices.
I just made some dinner and was thinking about how salt and spices[1] now are dirt cheap, but throughout history they were precious and expensive. I did some digging and apparently low and middle class people didn’t even really have access to spices. It was more for the wealthy.
Salt was important mainly to preserve food. They didn’t have fridges back then! So even poor people usually had some amount of salt to preserve small quantities of food, but they had to be smart about how they allocated it.
In researching this I came to realize that throughout history, food was usually pretty gross. Meats were partially spoiled, fats went rancid, grains were moldy. This would often cause digestive problems. Food poisoning was a part of life.
Could you imagine! That must have been terrible!
Meanwhile, today, not only is it cheap to access food that is safe to eat, it’s cheap to use basically as much salt and spices as you want. Fry up some potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and spices. Throw together some beans and rice. Incorporate a cheap acid if you’re feeling fancy—maybe some malt vinegar with the potatoes or white vinegar with the beans and rice. It’s delicious!
I suppose there are tons of examples of how good we have it today, and how bad people had it throughout history. I like thinking about this sort of thing though. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think I feel some sort of obligation. An obligation to view these sorts of things as they actually are rather than how they compare to the Joneses, and to appreciate when I truly do have it good.
It feels weird to say the phrase “salt and spices”. It feels like it’s an error and that I meant to say “salt and pepper”. Maybe there’s a more elegant way of saying “salt and spices”, but it of course isn’t an error.
It makes me think back to something I heard about “salt and pepper”, maybe in the book How To Taste. We often think of them as going together and being on equal footing. They aren’t on equal footing though, and they don’t always have to go together. Salt is much more important. Most dishes need salt. Pepper is much more optional. Really, pepper is a spice, and the question is 1) if you want to add spice to your dish and 2) if so, what spice. You might not want to add spice, and if you do want to add spice, pepper might not be the spice you want to add. So maybe “salt and spices” should be a phrase that is used more often than “salt and pepper”.
I read something a while back (wish I remembered the source) about how the rotten meat thing is sort-of less gross than you’re thinking, since fermented meat can taste good if you do it right (think: sausage and aged steak), and presumably ancient people weren’t constantly sick.
Edit: I think the source is this: https://earthwormexpress.com/the-prehistory-of-food/in-prehistory-we-ate-fermented-foods/
Although the descriptions might make you appreciate modern food even more.
I think you presume incorrectly. People in primitive cultures spend a lot of time with digestive issues and it’s a major cause of discomfort, illness, and death.
I have a theory that the contemporary practice of curry with rice represents a counterfeit yearning for high meat with maggots. I wonder if high meat has what our gut biomes are missing.
That seems plausible. There’s also hedonic adaptation stuff. Things that seem gross to us might have been fine to people in earlier eras. Although Claude claims that having said all of this, people still often found their food to be gross.
I read that this “spoiled meat” story is pretty overblown. And it doesn’t pass the sniff test either. Most meat was probably eaten right after slaughter, because why wouldn’t you?
Also herbs must have been cheaply available. I also recently learned that every household in medieval Europe had a mother of vinegar.
In the Odyssey, every time they eat meat, the slaughter happens right beforehand. There were (are?) African herding tribes who consume blood from their living livestock rather than slaughtering it for meat. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest dried their salmon for later in the year.
Spices is probably too general and all-encompassing to say that spices are now dirt cheap. While, as is true to this day, the wealthy have better access to spices and other garnishes (saffron and truffles aren’t exactly dirt cheap today) but even in Roman times the use of “spices” was not in itself a signifier of class (perhaps more important is which spices). Now in case you think that literary evidence in the form of cookbooks doesn’t provide a broad cross-section of the average Roman Diet, then perhaps you’d be interested in recent analysis of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum sewers which show not only that most of the food was made from local ingredients (with the exception of Egyptian Grain, North African dates and Indian Pepper) but also the presence of bay, cumin, mallow from a non-elite apartment complex.
And let’s not forget how easily things go the other way, Lobster was often seen as a poorman’s food, most archeological sits of early human settlements will find a pile of oyster or similar shellfish garbage dumps—it often being the easiest source of food.
You know what they say about the good old days? They are a product of a bad memory.
FWIW “salt and spices” reads as a perfectly normal phrase to me.
In my kitchen, I don’t give any special priority to salt and pepper, they’re just two seasonings among many. My most-used seasoning is probably garlic powder.
How come no special priority to salt? From what I understand getting the salt level right is essential (“salt to taste”). Doing so makes a dish taste “right” and it brings out the flavors of the other ingredients, making them taste more like themself, and not necessarily making the dish taste saltier in too noticeable a way.
I don’t salt most food because excess sodium is unhealthy and it’s pretty easy to exceed the recommended dose. IIRC the healthiest dose is 1500–2000 mg and most people eat more like twice that much.
To my knowledge, sodium is the only seasoning that commonly causes health problems. All other seasonings are nutritious or at worst neutral. In fact I think this distinction justifies use of the phrase “salt and spices” as meaning “[the unhealthy seasoning] and [the healthy seasonings]”.
I often add soy sauce to food (which has a lot of sodium) and eat foods that already contain salt (like imitation meat or tortilla chips or salted nuts). I rarely add salt to foods.
I don’t think I lose much by not salting food. Many people way over-salt their food to my taste. (I remember when I used to eat at my university’s dining hall, about 1 in 5 dishes were borderline inedible due to too much salt.)
I took a cooking class once. The instructor’s take on this was that yes, people do have too much sodium. But that is largely because processed food and food at restaurants has crazy amounts of sodium. Salting food that you cook at home is totally fine and is really hard to overdo in terms of health impact.
In fact, she called it out as a common failure mode where home cooks are afraid to use too much salt in their food. Not only is doing so ok, but even if it wasn’t, by making your food taste better, it might motivate you to eat at home more and on balance lower your total sodium intake.
Related to that, I’ve noticed that “external” salt tastes way saltier per mg of sodium than “internal” salt. Taking a sample of two items from my kitchen:
Gardein crispy chick’n has 2.0 mg sodium per calorie, and doesn’t taste salty at all to me
Mission tortilla chips have 0.7 mg sodium per calorie, and taste significantly salty
I generally prefer external salt for that reason.
(Maybe you’re looking for the word ‘seasoning’...? But maybe that includes other herbs in a way you didn’t want.)
Hm, maybe. I feel like sometimes “seasoning” can refer to “salt and spices” but in other contexts, like the first sentence of my OP, it moreso points to spices.