Coming to India, almost every cuisine is spicy for sure. At least I don’t know of one that is not. Indians grow up immersed in spicy food and can’t live without it. And to be honest once your palette gets used to spicy flavor it’s hard to go back to bland food. Anecdotally I’ve heard many westerns complain about blandness of their food once they are used to Indian flavor.
Very few Indian cuisines dual up “hot” knob. Andhra Pradesh cuisine is an example of that. It’s almost at the limit of not killing the flavor.
So to summarize about India, we almost universally love spicy food. Some of us like it hot too
If something is flavored with other spices, it's "spiced." e.g. "pumpkin (pie) spiced latte" or "jerk spiced."
For example, English Fuggle hops are typically described as "spicy", when the spice flavors in question are more along the lines of clove or allspice and not capsicum.
I disagree. You're describing the difference between "spicy" (e.g., cayenne) and "warm spiced" or "spiced" (e.g., cumin). When a dish tastes of cumin, one doesn't call it "spicy", they use a different term.
So, how do you call that, if not spicy? It's a genuine question because English is not my first language and I always refer to food that's heavy on spices as "spicey", because I don't know any other word for it.
Many dishes contain a lot of spices (nutmeg, cardamom, clove, etc.) but they aren't considered "spicy" because there's no sensation of heat/burning. These dishes are "spiced" but not "spicy" (in English).
It doesn't necessarily make sense, but that is just how common usage has evolved.
Truth be told, in Greek also, where we have lots of dishes with many spices (and some which are made with specific spices, like pastitsada) we don't have a special word for "food with lots of spices" either. We just use the circumlocution.
I think it is an ambiguous category. At least to native (American) English speakers and heathens like me. The only evidence I can offer of this is that in my language culture, I routinely hear "spicy hot", and often enough when one should simply say "spicy", anticipate the question "spicy hot"?
That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
>> That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
Oh, actually I learned some Latin in high school, most of which is now forgotten. But, I was surprised by that turn of phrase myself: I was trying to translate from the Greek in my head to English and suddendly a bit of Latin fell out :)
Edit: Also, to be fair, I love surprising my native English speaker interlocutors with weird little bits of English they never use and which I know because I first learned English not as my everyday language, but from books and textbooks. It helps that some of those weird bits are well, Greek. e.g. I surprised my thesis advisor the other day when I used the Greek plural of "lemma", "lemmata" which turns out to be perfectly correct English, although it's not often used. My advisor suggested I refrain from using such obscure words in papers since most reviewers would probably be confused by them and be annoyed at me- and you don't want to piss off reviewers!
You are actually correct, it's the English that use the word wrong.
Spicey should be a measure of the variety of spices used... A very small % of people from spice rich countries would consider pepper a primary or default "spice".
I suspect this misuse is due to the early 12th-16th century English population's ignorance of the complexity of global spice markets and black pepper being one of the first popularized spices once trade routes expanded.
Peppery would make much more sense.
I might also call it spicy because of the chili pepper.
India is also one of the few places I've been to where chilis are regularly used for breakfast dishes and even drinks like aam ka panna (spicy green mango juice).
To reply that "hotness is relative" without clarifying which usage of the word you mean or implying that your friend in the anecdote even made that clarification is exactly what the person you are replying to is complaining about.
This limitation of colloquial English where the word "spicy" is overloaded to refer to all three axis of "spicy" at the same time and hot is also (though less frequently) overloaded in the same manner is exactly what we're discussing.
You can have something that's not very "hot" be very "spicy" on one of the other two axis. Try eating a tablespoon of cinnamon or that Chinese mustard that comes with takeout.
European food that is "spicy" on one axis but nearly zero on the other two is rare hence why this overloading exists and isn't really a problem when discussing food from anywhere that doesn't have a rainy season.
There are also many chili peppers that are sweet and mild - Ancho Chiles, Poblanos, Aji Panca being examples. There are also many Indian regional cuisines that are spicy but not hot - Punjabi and West Bengal come to mind.
However, a dish incorporating them isn't usually referred to as spicy in my experience. Unless it also contains chili pepper.