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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

There’s a tendency to conflate “spicy” flavor with “chilly” or “hot”. They are two orthogonal parameters, you could dial (up or down) them independent of each other. Most spices aren’t chilly, they add unique smell and flavor without burning the tongue.

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

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In my experience, "spicy" refers almost exclusively to chili pepper, with the sensation you get from black pepper, mustard or horseradish being edge cases.

If something is flavored with other spices, it's "spiced." e.g. "pumpkin (pie) spiced latte" or "jerk spiced."

I've seen "spicy" used by the beer community to describe spiced flavors of certain strains of hops.

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.

There’s a tendency to conflate “spicy” flavor with “chilly” or “hot”.

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.

There's a traditional dish from the Greek island of Corfu called "pastitsada". It's pasta topped with meat (usually beef) cooked in a red tomato sauce with cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, clove, paprika, chilli pepper, black pepper and cumin. I typically add white pepper and cardamom, others have their own secret recipes.

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.

In English, "spicy" (usually) means that it will cause your tongue to burn and/or tingle due to the effects of chili pepper or black pepper or hot mustard or anything that causes your mouth to react with what I would call a physical sensation rather than a flavor sensation (of course they are not entirely distinct but that is where I draw the line).

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.

OK. Well, I've been using it wrong then :)

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.

>OK. Well, I've been using it wrong then :)

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".

It's an English word. Maybe it doesn't jibe with your concept of spices, but you can hardly say native English speakers are using the word wrong.

It doesn't make logical sense.

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.

> 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 ;-)

Ah, that's a good point. I'm sure I've heard that question often- "spichy hot?". Kind of like "funny weird or funny ha-ha?".

>> 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!

I guess this is an American thing. Typically "spicy" relates to the heat level. The "spices" used in the food typically are described with other terms ("well seasoned", "flavored", etc)

fragrant and spicy

I'd probably just call it flavorful. Might be described as "warm spiced" on a restaurant menu because of the first four spices, which are often included in blends called (among other names) warm spices.

I might also call it spicy because of the chili pepper.

It has chili peppers, so you certainly can call it spicy, if you want to highlight that aspect of the flavor specifically. But you don't need to limit yourself to one word, especially when it seems like this dish has a lot of different aspects to it, so you could also use others like "spiced" or "warmly spiced" to refer to the flavors like cinnamon, cumin clove, etc, specifically or that a lot of such spices were used.

Hotness is relative though: they may not "dial it up" by Indian standards, but chili still makes its way into almost everything. A Russian colleague of mine visiting Delhi, not generally regarded as a hotbed of hotness, found virtually everything except dal makhani inedibly spicy -- because she was used to Russian food, where chilis traditionally don't feature at all.

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).

Sure but did she find it spicy as in "having copious amounts of spice" or spicy as "a taste similar to food that is of a high temperature" or spicy as in "off-gassing something that irritates one's nasal passages" (I don't really consider this last one "spicy" or "hot" but many people do so I'm including it)?

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.

Can’t speak for the rest of the anglosphere, but in the US, when someone says “spicy”, they mean “this has too much capsaicin”. If someone were referring to the strength of the taste, they would probably just say “I don’t like this flavor”, or as a stretch, “the spices in this dish are too strong”. Not sure what point you’re making here. I assure you, even though there may not be dedicated words for them, English speakers are quite able to articulate the differences between the different categories of plants that are added to food to make it taste better.

No, food can be spicy without being hot. The OPs point I believe is that hot and spicy are often incorrectly used interchangeably. Dishes with cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, nutmeg, star anise, cardomom could all be considered "spicy" but without a component that specifically adds heat(chili seeds, wasabi, horseradish, tobasco) they would not be hot.

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.

I don't think it's incorrect per se to uses spicy and hot interchangeably. It's just maybe not common to all dialects of English. Where I'm from nobody would refer to a dish flavored with your first list as spicy.

No cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, nutmeg, star anise are ingredients common to every spice rack and every grocery store's spice aisle in the English speaking world. Even one of Starbucks most popular drinks is a "Spiced Pumpkin Latte" which consists of pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, served over ice. During the European Age of Discovery the "Spice Island" i.e the Molucas in what is now Indonesia were so important because they were the source of nutmeg and cloves. Spice is added to food for either flavor or aroma. Heat is a sensation, its felt. Lastly Capsaicin - the compound in the ribs and oil of peppers doesn't add flavor just a sensation. There is no such thing as a salty, sweet or bitter heat. And it's not just English, in Spanish something that had heat such as a hot salsa would be considered "piquante" but not spicy.

Cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, nutmeg and star anise are undoubtedly spices. Didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

However, a dish incorporating them isn't usually referred to as spicy in my experience. Unless it also contains chili pepper.

Yeah sorry, by spicy I meant hot. Every cuisine uses spices of some kind. As another commenter said, spicy usually means hot, while spiced means it has some kind of condiment in it such as salt and pepper or any other kind.

I found the cuisine of Tamil Nadu near Madurai to not be very spicy. Perhaps that's because I'm used to Andhra food, with our explosive mango pickles.

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