I had a conversation with my dad (currently in his late 60s) about what eating was like growing up and he said: "Well, we didn't have any spicy food." and I asked: "Like what? Mexican? Schezuwan? Thai?" and his answer was: "Any food with garlic".
It's difficult to believe, but just 100 years ago a food as commonplace as spaghetti with tomato sauce was considered somewhat exotic; at the least predominately an ethnic Italian dish.
Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat. Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce, as a result of an effort to encourage more domestic consumption of chicken.
I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cornell-chicken-barbec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
I'll have to try stretchy Turkish ice-cream sometime (where do you find that?) but Pad Thai and bulgogi are already everyday foods you can find on every corner of every strip mall in the part of America where I live.
The distinction seems to be: > Two qualities distinguish Turkish ice cream: hard texture and resistance to melting, brought about by inclusion of the thickening agents salep, a flour made from the root of the early purple orchid, and mastic, a resin that imparts chewiness.[citation needed]
> The Kahramanmaraş region is known for maraş dondurması, a variety which contains distinctly more salep than usual. Tough and sticky, it is sometimes eaten with a knife and fork.[citation needed]
I remember going to my great-grandparents' house with KFC, because, to them (born circa 1900) fried chicken was food you ate on special occasions.
Which makes perfect sense: Frying anything is messy work (I know from personal experience aerosolized grease stings) and if chicken is expensive on top of that, fried chicken would be doubly uncommon for the average person, especially if they grew up poor, as my great-grandparents did.
You don't make something like that at home.
They are only open during the summer (April-ish to October-ish), and fried chicken is only served on fridays. And they only make 30 servings, so GET THERE if you want some, before it sells out. There will be a line.
If you want Doug Flicker fried chicken and don't want to wait, you can also get some at Bull's Horn, his new neighborhood tavern at 46th St and 34th Ave. It's a different recipe, but still very good.
Everyone else agrees that Revival has the best fried chicken. They're wrong. Revival's chicken is a bit underseasoned imho (but excellent). Victory 44 was right up there with those two, but closed recently. Sigh.
In Minneapolis, there's a chef who calls himself the "Sioux Chef", who is dedicated to preserving pre-colonial Native American foods. A big part of this is the ingredients... no flour, no cooking oil, no refined sugar, no beef or pork, etc. The "frybread" that we think of as "Indian food" today is totally a product of conquest... when the only ingredients available were flour, cooking oil, and cheap ground beef.
I hate to even imagine what's happening to the Kentucky bbq tradition I grew up on.
As half the year makes it impossible to farm, the winter months consisted traditionally of anything that could be salted, dried, and/or pickled.
But these days we can pick up fresh strawberries in the store year round.
Two Michelin starred, too! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)
I tried this out recently and it was delicious and not at all what you would think if you're only familiar with raw garlic:
Garlic is delicious.
The Stinking Rose in SF.
Hoover promised voters 'a chicken in every pot' almost 100 years ago. 50 years ago, yard bird was a very common meal for Americans of every income level.
I guess it would depend on the individual definition of "everyday." Personally, I eat more pad thai than I do cheeseburgers. I don't eat much Korean BBQ anymore but my wife and I do stop by a Korean place pretty often to have Galbi-tang and sometimes Dolsot Bibimbap. I haven't had In-N-Out in probably 7 or 8 weeks, though, which would make it more of a rarity in my own life than: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai food.
On the positive side, a couple of Somali places and a Kenyan place in town have cracked the code, and are offering slick, friendly Chipotle-style counter service experiences with really delicious food.
The closest I think in English is how we have modified the word "spice" to be, in context, "spiced" vs "spicy".
The former implies the "herbs and spices" and the latter the "hot pepper" types. But it's not exactly consistent.
We of course have the modifier "hot" which works. And we stole piquant from the french, but that is a little different I think.
I've also heard foods described as having "bite" to indicate that they have a strong, spicy flavor, but not necessarily a "hot" one.
That's not currently a real English word. But it could be!
It's a minefield of ambiguity which a new word could easily solve. It could well be, as you say, it's only recently that hot spices have become mainstream.
I grew up in the 1960s & 70s in northern England and as a kid my parents may put some very old pre-ground pepper on the table occasionally. Garlic didn't exist to us. I burst out and enjoy hot, bitter, gnarly flavours.
Spicy for them was shake and baked bbq chicken. Otherwise, the main flavorings in use were salt, butter, yellow onion and microscopic quantities of pepper.
Even today, I have a friend from Boston who treats ketchup as a spicy condiment, almost like midwestern friends treat Tabasco.
Other parts of the US had a spicier food culture -- the Cajuns, the Southwest, African-Americans, etc. But the wealthy parts of America liked very bland, well-processed food.
This fresh onion juice concept is thought provoking as well. Recently tried making latke and upon shredding my onions was left with onion juice but it did not occur to me that this liquid could be put to use.
And near the center most crops are just for personal consumption. Yet no one grows garlic. I was shocked by this.
He said he'd be the first to grow garlic in the whole village. He has of course lived many years in Sweden where I was born and raised before he moved back for his twilight years.
In Sweden garlic has been very common for my entire life, since at least 1985.
I can only speculate but it's likely that I had access to garlic due to global imports.
And it's also likely his fellow villagers, many in their 50s and older, aren't used to garlic because they didn't grow up with it.
I need to get to the bottom of this.
The comment I replied to used the term in the context of the 5 basic tastes, not as a culinary term.
I really don't think so: 'savory' is an actual English word while 'umami' is a Japanese one. Writing 'umami' like writing 'arugula' instead of 'rocket' or 'cilantro' instead of 'coriander.'
And 'umami' isn't really any more accurate than 'savory': it's a 100-year-old neologism from the Japanese word for 'delicious.' Given a choice between two words which aren't necessarily perfect fits for the concept, why not stick with the native one?
Starch is another contender, though we are not sure about the receptor for that one.
It's a difficult taste to describe, but it's almost like chili that's "cold"/"icy" instead of "hot"/"burning".
Thank you for the reference.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Huang-Spicy-Crispy-Peanut-Ounce/dp/B0...