Why do people like peppery food?

[helenjp]

Ever heard of Pasturization?

That's what I mean...refrigeration, canning, pasteurization, zapping of one form and another, and we suddenly get very lazy about checking if our food is really fresh enough to eat.

[froufrou]

Off topic... but in the States we would not eat eggs not refrigerated...here in France that's the only way they come. We eat them without any problem!

Most of the time...we find eggs haven't much flavor, thank goodness for hot sauce!

Oh yeah! The unrefrigerated milk in the box, it's not bad!

[Stigand]

This thing about spices and hot condiments being used to mask rotting food...I really, really doubt this.

I agree that it's unlikely that spices and chillis have ever been widely used to mask rotten food.

I think the idea is a mistaken extension of an older (and in some ways understandable) Anglo-Saxon cultural prejudice: namely that fresher, high quality ingredients could be prepared in simple ways with few flavourings, whereas inferior ingredients needed tarting up.

This idea is prevalent in eighteenth-century English discussions of how England's cuisine differed from that of, say, France. In England, luxury ingredients (in particular prime cuts of meat) were more generally affordable (initially because of high livestock-population ratios, then increasing because of wealth). By the eighteenth century, this was tinged with political prejudice too: the English could afford good honest plain meat because they lived in a fair and well-governed society, the French lived in an impoverished tyranny and so couldn't (see Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England - http://www.peterwestern.f9.co.uk/hogarth/hogarth36.html).

So elaborately cooked food was inherently suspicious - the implication being that the spices, ragouts and fricasees were concealing suspect food. I suppose it's not hard to extrapolate 'suspect' to mean 'rotten'. But I doubt it was ever actually true.

[oraklet]

Oh yeah! The unrefrigerated milk in the box, it's not bad!

if you're talking uht-pasteurized, then oh no, it isn't. try as a contrast, the fresh milk in haute savoie. or swedish "old fashioned" milk.

but we'd better not go any further off topic!