This varies a little from my understanding I learned in school that food used to need to be heavily spiced because it was old/rancid, and that died down as fresh ingredients became more available.
I have to imagine that was it at least in part.
I have to imagine that was it at least in part.
The best evidence against it is that spices are expensive, if you could afford them, you could afford fresh food.
As spices became less expensive, TFA argues that became popular among poorer people. And so richer people instead came to emphasize the intrinsic flavors of foods.
But for that to work, those foods had to be high quality, and unspoiled. So, by TFA's argument, it was poorer people who came to use spices to mask low quality and spoiled foods.
Classical French Haute cuisine is heavily flavoured with fats (butter and creame) which required a lot of milk to create, i.e. the yield is low considering how much precious milk one had to put in. That was something that was at the time exclusively for the wealthy.
This is often said but I really doubt that it was ever true. Nobody ate meat that was old/rancid, because (1) that was a great way to get ill, and (2) a cook who let the meat go off would surely have been fired, meat was super-expensive. They knew damn well how to handle it without wasting any.
I'm sure the peasants sometimes ate cabbage that was past its sell-by date, but if that was all you could afford, then clearly you could not afford spices brought from across the world.
I find that hard to swallow.
I think if you are brought up on mutton, then mutton tastes great! Although mutton or hogget is hard to find now.
I generally dislike most European beef dishes because they use tasteless (to me) veal or wintered(?) cattle. I prefer grass fed - probably because that is what I am used to?
And then it seems the same crowd get excited about wild pork or venison - strong flavored - the opinions just seem dissonant to me.
Although I do find ram, billy goat, and old glandy boar are rather too tasty for me!
> I think if you are brought up on mutton, then mutton tastes great
No one has been "brought up on" any kind of meat further ago than the last 100 years or so, people couldn't afford it. People kept animals until they were old and had no other purposes (like milk or wool) before they were killed for meat.