Taste Mockers

The 17th century was a watershed in European food history. At the beginning, cookbooks written in the Renaissance and even the Middle Ages were still in print, and the English and the French still cooked much alike. At the end of the century, people were making fun of stupid old-fashioned cookery and the English and French had started to despise each other’s tastes.

The French, who had been at least as crazy for spices as anybody else in the Middle Ages, decided that excessive spice use was bad; it made dishes bitter and masked the true flavors of the ingredients. Maybe they’d simply realized this, but maybe the fact that spices had become cheap and were no longer a high-prestige ingredient helped open their eyes. The French persisted in their prejudice against spices until nouvelle cuisine made a crack in the consensus, but even today you sometimes meet French people who declare that they can’t stand a dish with more than two spices in it, and one of them had better be plain old black pepper.

The English kept on using spices--less, as time went by, in the dishes themselves and more in table condiments such as prepared mustard, bottled sauces and spicy pickles--but they turned their backs on garlic. At the beginning of the century, there was still an English proverbial saying, “He could eat my heart without garlic,” which meant, “He hates me so much he’d eat my heart even without seasoning.” By the end of the century, that saying had become, “He could eat my heart with garlic,” meaning that even awful garlic wouldn’t stop him.