What was food like before middle-eastern/east Asian spices arrived in the West?
I don't know, but modern French food tries to rely on local ingredients rather than imported or foreign herbs and spices, so it wasn't neccesarily as bland as people might imagine
Salty and vinagary.
>>1069739
This pretty much.
Plenty of flavorings outside spices (i.e. condiments, oils, and sauces.)
>>1069527
Well, at this point in time most people couldn't afford proper spices and even salt was a luxury, but we always had plenty of European herbs and such to flavor food with, varying wildly by location (yes, berries can be the flavor in a meat dish). Something tells me we still wouldn't have welcomed the Moors, no matter how much sumac or cilantro they offered in exchange for our obedience.
>>1069739
Depending on where you lived there would be a section of the woods left as "the commons" where people could go gather wild herbs and stuff. People always try their best to make things taste good, so they'd be using a lot of boiling and cauldron-cooking to get the most of the muted flavors they had available to them (like fennel, thyme, rosemary, basil, etc)
>>1069527
Spice trade is old. REALLY old.
>>1069946
But it was also super fucking expensive, almost everyone who weren't the highest echelon of society couldn't afford them