Looking at animals, we can see that some of them are attracted to foods with a strong taste. Dogs will eat grass to make themselves throw up (not to mention their propensity for eating feces) and cows occasionally get into a patch of oniongrass, ruining the entire animal's flavor.
I never understood the desire to thoroughly cook (as opposed to blanching) something that is edible in its raw form, like onions or cabbage. The texture and flavor suffer. Lactic acid fermentation (breaking down inedible carbohydrates to an edible form) I understand; boiling into slimy, sulfurous mush is incomprehensible. Maybe this comes from an agricultural society where the women worked all day, so the most efficient thing was to throw everything into a pot and leave it on the fire all day.
Another interesting thing is the ubiquitous adaptation of red pepper into South, Central and East Asian cuisine in the last 400 years, and its rejection by the Europeans. This has to have some biochemical differences at its root, since other plants like tea spread
I do not think it has much to do with agriculture. Onion was not domesticated in the Americas, but the Indians collected wild onions and put them into stews and soups. You are right that it simmered whole day (it is a simple way to cook a lot of food for a lot of people) but the bottom line is that they added wild onions, garlic, leeks, ramp. They liked 'em! - while ignoring mustard.
One possibility is that people simply looked for sodium replacement. If you boil, you greatly dilute salts, so it does not taste good unless salted. But salt was relatively scarce. If you use onion and gralic powder or grate onions over the stew you trick yourself into believeing it is salty.
it strikes me as possible that Euros and Asians just have some kind of biochemical differences making them have different food preferences-for instance, Bosnia is a stone's throw away from Turkey, and Serbia is even closer. Turkey occupied both for hundreds of years, and their fundamental vocabulary has been heavily influenced by Turkish (words like "pillow," "no," "welcome," all words associated with horseriding, etc., are Turkish.) Yet their food is closer to that of the Russians in many ways, who are further away. You can't even find spicy peppers in the Balkans (with the exception of the Serbs, who eat green peppers, mostly raw.) Other spices have made their way into Balkan cuisine, but none of them are hot. Meanwhile, every Turkish restaurant has a shaker of red pepper flakes on every table. Why would this be?
The "Turks" are Anatolian Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians converted to Islam after the Seljuk conquest. Genetically, the contribution of the Seljuk Turkish migrants in Turkey is barely detectable, there were too few of them and they immediately adsorbed. Check
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I never understood the desire to thoroughly cook (as opposed to blanching) something that is edible in its raw form, like onions or cabbage. The texture and flavor suffer. Lactic acid fermentation (breaking down inedible carbohydrates to an edible form) I understand; boiling into slimy, sulfurous mush is incomprehensible. Maybe this comes from an agricultural society where the women worked all day, so the most efficient thing was to throw everything into a pot and leave it on the fire all day.
Another interesting thing is the ubiquitous adaptation of red pepper into South, Central and East Asian cuisine in the last 400 years, and its rejection by the Europeans. This has to have some biochemical differences at its root, since other plants like tea spread
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One possibility is that people simply looked for sodium replacement. If you boil, you greatly dilute salts, so it does not taste good unless salted. But salt was relatively scarce. If you use onion and gralic powder or grate onions over the stew you trick yourself into believeing it is salty.
Reply
it strikes me as possible that Euros and Asians just have some kind of biochemical differences making them have different food preferences-for instance, Bosnia is a stone's throw away from Turkey, and Serbia is even closer. Turkey occupied both for hundreds of years, and their fundamental vocabulary has been heavily influenced by Turkish (words like "pillow," "no," "welcome," all words associated with horseriding, etc., are Turkish.) Yet their food is closer to that of the Russians in many ways, who are further away. You can't even find spicy peppers in the Balkans (with the exception of the Serbs, who eat green peppers, mostly raw.) Other spices have made their way into Balkan cuisine, but none of them are hot. Meanwhile, every Turkish restaurant has a shaker of red pepper flakes on every table. Why would this be?
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