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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Every time I hear about treasure troves of spices, I wonder, are they really that good and valuable? I mean we have the same spices today, we don't particularly use a lot of them and even when we do, the taste is better, but not extremely so. Perhaps if you just had salt to season your food, anything that'd make it taste better would be valuable.

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Spices are compact, storable, highly concentrated, and hard to counterfeit. You and I eat them daily in everything either directly, or as artificial flavors that have been designed to replace the expensive stuff. They are a good choice for long-haul trade.

> They were also used as a way to mask unpleasant tastes and odors of food, and later, to keep food fresh [1]

Perhaps food wasn't always so fresh back then.

[1] https://www.mccormickscienceinstitute.com/resources/history-...

This theory never made any sense to me. Why mask the taste of substandard food with incredibly expensive condiments?

Because the alternative is starvation. It's not like great food is available for much of the winter in many places. If you couldn't eat the somewhat rotten pie, you didn't eat.

So in that situation trade the costly spices for ten non-rotten pies, is my point.

There aren't ten non-rotten pies available. As winter progresses, almost all the food is getting progressively more rotten.

This story is of a Norwegian ship, a place where they regularly ate fish soaked in lye. Their food options weren't great.

Yes, I give up, you are right. As winter progresses in Norway, everything starts to go off in the heat and the only way to avoid starvation is to season the rapidly decomposing food supply with spices worth more than their weight in gold. I withdraw my erroneous comment.

"Spices can also exert antimicrobial activity in two ways: by preventing the growth of spoilage microorganisms (food preservation), and by inhibiting/regulating the growth of those pathogenic (food safety; Tajkarimi et al., 2010)"

Food can decompose even in the winter, but you likely knew that already given your sarcastic reply.

People don’t make a bunch pies in fall and then store them for winter. They’ll store rawer ingredients, like flour, live animals or dried and pickled veggies and meats that don’t perish as easily.

People would often make a pot pie, which got it's name from literally being the pot they cooked the food in. Everyday they'd remove the top, add more ingredients, and cook it again.

I'm unsure of which regions did this, but I didn't mean they baked a bunch of pies in the fall.

Also known as a perpetual stew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

Imagine buying all your food for the winter around November. How tasty do you think it would be around February?

One reason spices were treasured may be because back then, European food was much more bland that it is today. Think of all the foods of American origin which weren't known about (potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, chili peppers, cocoa etc).

> we don't particularly use a lot of them and even when we do, the taste is better, but not extremely so

Speak for yourself!

it might be a genetic thing or even an epi-genetic thing.

as a vegetarian spice is essential. a lot of indian vegetarian cuisine is about spice use such as frying seeds in oil, add some other powdered spices to make a paste, adding certain other spices near the end. etc etc.

I'm going to be charitable here and assume your exposure to different kinds of food, styles of cooking, and "foreign" cuisines is severely lacking.

Lol, I'm Indian, I am very well familiar with spices and "foreign" (by which you likely mean non-Western) foods in general. My point is that while spices are good, they are not mindblowingly good, like some drug. It's probably more a factor of me eating spices all my life and thinking that's normal, rather than eating bland food instead.

Your "charitable" ad-hominem is instead "severely lacking" in substance.

Salt was also very expensive.

Salarium, indeed.

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