Why were people so obsessed with spices? Yes they are tasty and nobility liked tasty food. Is that really worth travelling half the world?
Nigga have you tried eating meat without spices?
>>1400974
I dare you to eat a cooked steak as is.
>>1400983
A good steak literally needs nothing other than proper cooking
>>1400988
Found the idiot and/or poorfag
>>1400991
Yes.
Fuckin' bleb...
>>1400991
A bag of spices could be worth a lifetime of a farmer's wages.
So yes.
>>1400991
Yes.
How the fuck do you expect trade to work? Teleportation?
And India wasn't some unknown quarter that was dangerous to sail to. Romans in Egypt travelled there and bought spice and Indian traders vice versa.
>>1401011
FRESH HOT MEMES
>>1401011
What kind of an idiot would pay like 1,5 million dollars for condinement? Come on. There must be some other reason. Do spices give you magic powers or what?
>>1400974
Why were people obsessed with purple dyes? Do you know how fucking expensive they were to make!?
It was largely a social status thing, at first, so that alone made it worth it, for those with money would pay for them, just to prove they had money. As they became more plentiful, even the poor started using them to stretch their food supplies (soup goes a lot further if it's spiced). In addition, in ye olden days, spices were the primary method of preservation of meat.
>>1400988
Fucking pleb. Good meat is best naked!
>>1401020
A bag of real saffron still is.
Well, a good sized bag, and a poorly paid farmer's.
>>1401030
>1.5 million dollars is a farmers lifetime wages in the 1500s
lolno
>>1400990
This, OP is right... but I guess that's just what makes us interesting each and every one of us is unique.
>>1401080
[spoiler] they still are [/spoiler]
>>1401075
I am tryin to find the modern equivalent.
>>1401038
Rome empire consumed lots of purple dye for their everything - including the Church itself, every single priest had purple robes, and pretty much most soldiers with armors had purple capes.
It was the Byzantines theme color.
>>1401080
Why the fuck would someone waste money on spice to hide the taste of bad meat, instead of quality meat?
>>1401085
The highest it got in pre-industrial society was about 1,000
800 dollars would be a more likely figure.
It's working life that would be hard to quantify.
>>1401088
>WE ARE THE 1500 1%
>>1400974
>>1400991
You seem to believe that, if you were in London and wanted spices, you had to travel to the place where spices originate or at least send someone. That's not how it works. You probably got it from a guy in London, who got it from a guy in Flanders, who got it from a guy in Spain, who got it from a guy in Italy, who got it from a guy in Egypt, who got it from a guy in Yemen who got it from a guy in India. Actually there's probably way more guys in between.
Of course, some merchants made longer travels, but that wasn't the norm.
>>1401030
Prestige.
>>1401088
Obviously you'd use the cheaper spices.
>>1401086
I was thinking more of Queen's Elizabeth's age when it was hard as fuck to make, because you had to import the materials from BFE, but I suspect the Byzantines made it their theme color specifically because it was a sign of wealth and power as well. Though they probably cut some corners on how they went about making it... Likely not Tyrian Purple - where ya gotta carefully dissect about 10,000 mollusks for a gram - save maybe on the Emperor's robes.
>>1400991
Yes, because they are light, compact, and very useful. They are the first thing that would become profitable to ship over long distances as soon as the naval technology got to that point.
>>1401130
Point of autism here.
If it's civilian shipping it's maritime, not naval.
>>1400974
Why were people obsessed with gold? I mean you could do fuck-all with it.
Oh yeah, "status".
>>1401126
They used it as a luxury thing, I don't know what the other anon is talking about. It was basically like gold or silk.
>>1401134
I don't mind such autism. Thank you for the correciton. Naval was just the first word that pops into my head. I never use the word Maritime.
Maritime.
Maritime
Maritime.
>>1401151
I think the rotting meat thing came later on in the spice trade, once mass supplies of things like pepper became available.
But meat was much, much more expensive back in the day. It's easy to lose sight of how hard it is to produce meat in an agricultural society without mechanization.
>>1401168
The average Roman never even got to eat meat. They basically just had porridge. Plain porridge with nothing else, not even salt.
God I hate the concentration of wealth.
>>1401086
Eh... "Third-century Roman emperor Aurelian famously wouldn't allow his wife to buy a shawl made from Tyrian purple silk because it literally cost its weight in gold."
Though that's a special purple die - plus silk. Plus his wife was kind of naughty.
Was salted pork always common or was salt too expensive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg
>>1401209
That would depend on when and where... I suppose as meat goes, though, it's always been among the cheaper variants. Jerky of any sort... Chicken being the cheapest, I assume.
>>1401209
All you need to make salt is access to the sea.why the fuck was it so expensive? A fucking Hindu in a diaper made a bunch
>>1400974
Reminder that salt is a spice and salt is also a highly useful food preservative.
>>1401080
Bad meat as in bad quality? Because if you mean the victorian age bullshit of rotten meat, it's completely wrong
>>1401180
You would literally fucking die of nutritional deficiencies if you ate like that nigguh. Didn't Romans have fish sauce and wine with everything?
>what is scarcity
Fucking millennials. Hand everything to them on a silver platter and they start wondering why the peasants under Louis XVI didn't just content themselves smoking dank weed and playing Pokemon on their iPhones.
>>1401168
this
Also, people forget that refrigeration was much more difficult and often less consistent.
There's a reason we discovered aged food stuffs like aged (and I mean aged, not preserved) meat, cheese, beer, wine, spirits, vinegar, so on and so forth. Spoilage was a thing, and food was expensive enough for a lot of people to see if they could stomach that stuff. Some of it turned out to be delicious, sometimes healthier than non-aged food/drink, and even if it wasn't delicious, if you add enough spice you can cook stuff to oblivion, making it safer while dealing with possible off flavors and simple blandness of overcooked food with the spices.
>>1401221
>You would literally fucking die of nutritional deficiencies if you ate like that
Well, didn't they?
>>1401168
I was talking about the purple thing, sorry. Should've clarified.
>>1401216
Why would you make salt for the masses when you could be holding some rich patrician's glass of wine all day for a lot more money?
That's what concentration of wealth does. The masses are so poor that virtually every job in the economy is just to serve the rich. Like giving one forklift in a factor golden hubcaps before you even give the rest sparkplugs.
>>1400990
steak without salt and pepper gets boring pretty quick, especially if it's not a premium cut like filet.
>>1401231
The little bit of authoritative stuff I've read about it talks a lot about dates, grapes, wine, vinegar, seafood, eggs, that sort of stuff.
>>1401221
Nutritional deficiencies were probably common.
>>1401221
Well Rome typically had a higher death rate than birth rate and only survived and grew due to people from surrounding regions moving into the middle of the meat grinder. Disease was a major reason for the high death rates but I would imagine that would be exacerbated by the fact that most people living in the heart of Rome subsisted off of state provided grain and little else.
>>1401228
No amount of cooking makes turned meat safe to eat. What makes it noxious to your health isn't bacteria but toxic bacterial secretions.
>>1401216
Salt mines were a profitable enterprise, and while it was pretty much a staple everywhere, it was one of your more expensive ones in a lot of places. Getting usable salt from the sea wasn't always an easy process, mining dead sea beds was often more effective, but, in addition to all that hard labor, then you also had to transport it from there - thus shit got pricey. (Plus hording to control the price.)
Pork, similarly, was a luxury in a lot of places. Meat in general among the lower classes was fairly rare occurrence in ages past, depending on when and where you were, of course.
>>1401238
Among the patricians maybe. The economic disparity between classes in the Roman Empire got pretty absurd. Julius Caesar was able to get so much popular because he actually cared about feeding the starving masses.
>>1401250
>because he actually cared
Did he? Or did he just make them think they did?
>>1401258
Does it matter?
>>1401247
That is a safer assumption for a simple rule to live by, but the reality is there are different toxins from different bacteria, and spoilage is not always mutual with harmful bacteria. Some kinds of spoilage are due to harmful bacteria which can infect your gut, which can then produce enough toxins over time to mess you up, sometimes the toxins can be rendered inert via cooking, sometimes the cooking itself is a form of preservation (cook it long, put it in a pot, cover with long rendered/filtered fat).
>>1401248
>Getting usable salt from the sea wasn't always an easy process
Yest it was. It has always been piss easy people just didn't do it because they were retarded.
>>1401250
I have a hard time imagining people not have fairly consistent access to seafood, eggs, and dried fruit.
>>1401269
Some times the spoilage is a form of preservation.
>>1401279
Yep, which I alluded to earlier.
>>1401258
I suspect, from his writings, Julius had more appreciation of the suffering of the common man than most, especially of the common soldier. I suppose some of the better Emperors had an advantage that way - they'd lived among their fellow soldiers, a few even making an effort to disguise themselves and continue to do so, according to legend, at least.
Can't say that of most modern leaders - who almost invariably come from the upper crust, even among those few who have spent time as soldiers (and even then, generally officers).
>>1400988
Kill yourself.
Interestingly, a lot of spices are lightly toxic and have - as example - anti-cancer properties or otherwise benefits to the immune system.
>>1401275
The population of Rome was huge and they had no money to spend on anything.
Roman farm land had gradually been bought up by patricians and worked inefficiently by slaves. The middle class disappeared. The previous poor farm owners left with nothing moved into Rome itself and worked in sweatshops for a penance. The masses didn't even have enough money to feed themselves by even the most basic means.
That's why Julius Caesar was so popular. He gave the masses government aid and promised land reform.
>>1401301
*pittance
>>1401271
Mining is still more efficient than evaporation in most cases, to this day. Very little of the salt on your table comes from the sea.
There's only a few places where you can extract salt from the sea in a practical manner. It requires a warm climate where the evaporation rate exceeds the precipitation rate, for extended periods and where there are steady prevailing winds to boot. The metallurgy for brine boilers wasn't around back then. Even when they could do it, it meant carving out huge swaths of land to create a partition between a concentrating pond and the crystallizing pond, requiring a huge amount of man power, all of which were reduced to nothing come the first rain, and you got to start all over again.
>>1401301
Well, could be I was reading recipes from a different time period or something, too. I'm not terribly versed in the history of Rome or anything like that. I've just read ~50 or so translated recipes (for common peoples, on up to feast foods).
>>1401335
Even poor people have special days where they eat a bit better.
>>1401335
>"""common people"""
Maybe they didn't have quotation marks back then?
The Roman Republic wasn't even that bad in the beginning. But as Rome conquered and acquired slaves to replace the middle class everything just went to shit.
>>1401060
>$4750 for 1 kilo
G-sus
>>1401180
Without the concentration of wealth we wouldn't have gotten where we are right now where a never before seen amount of people gets to eat meat.
Also I doubt kwashiokor was a thing in Rome, they probably had other sources even at the poorest, or they just plain starved.
>>1401030
Because they were rich as fuck and couldn't find enough ways to make their money.
>>1401396
Spend*
>>1401390
I'm an avid meat eater, so I appreciate the result, but even I have to admit, this is getting kinda scary.
Wonder how soon before we have to convert to vat grown meat and milk, and watch half of the mammalian weight on the planet go extinct.
>>1401180
Even if things were split evenly between everyone, pre-industrial societies simply don't have enough economic productivity to produce the level of nutrition we take for granted.
>>1401349
I'm pretty sure these were truly common people recipes. Lots of porridge, but also mentioning that eggs were frequent as a cheap and available source of protein, as well as seafood when near the coast, often in combination with porridge. So it's not like they just had millet or barley stewed in water all day everyday, and nothing else. If I remember correctly, the feast food stuff was mostly focused on merchant class, which I assumed was middle to middle-upper class. I remember that I was looking specifically for "normal" food, but I don't think I saved any of the sources that I found anywhere. I remember combing through a bunch of shitty stuff from renaissance fair idiots on my way, too, so I'm sure I didn't stop until I found some stuff with decent value.
>>1401416
Don't forget beans.
Rice and beans make a complete protein.
It was, and is, the cheapest way to survive as a human.
>>1401373
The farmers don't see a cent figurativly.
>>1401419
A lot of vegetables grow well under most conditions.
That's where the vitamins would typically come from.
That said, from the period from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of human beings were malnourished.
>>1401406
If you have good access to a diverse assortment of vegetables and fruit then you don't really need meat.
>>1401419
Death from malnutrition was kinda par for the course for the poor, and has remained so until very recently (even now, it puts a dent in it, even if it's more a lack of quality than quantity).
Life expectancy for everyone outside of the upper-middle class on up was kinda ass.
>>1401431
>>1401419
Why do you think modern humans are so much taller than humans were just a century or two ago? They were all malnourished.
Also dietary retirements are determined by finding the minimum amount of a nutrient that the average person gets before negative side effects are observed then that value is doubled. So it's not like you will drop dead if you only get 25% of modern requirements of a lot of nutrients every day. You'll just feel like crap.
>>1401431
I hope you die without ever making children.
Considering your views and your presence in this board that must be pretty likely.
>>1401431
Both "How not to die" and "the food hourglass" pretty much say this yea. And they aren't written by gurus but by actual doctors.
I personally think the best option is the majority vegetables (also legumes) and fruit + minority meat. Insects, which scientists advocate but aren't catching on, are for me very interesting.
Also stable foods such as rice, wheat and potatoes are considered unhealthy by at the least the doctor who wrote "the food hourglass". Legumes are the way to go, but they have side-effects (i.e. gas).
>>1401494
Beans, brah.
Beans.
Grains, beans, and some veggies and you're good.
Well, not good, but alive.
>>1401494
>rice, wheat, and potatoes are considered unhealthy by at the least the doctor who wrote "the food hourglass".
Either he is a cook or he meant to say """unhealthy""".
>>1401494
>Legumes are the way to go, but they have side-effects (i.e. gas).
You might explode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bMpFWNVAVc
>>1401825
Salt isn't a spice you tard.
>>1400988
Holy shit how fucking uneducated are you
>>1400974
The spice must flow, little friend.
>>1400988
I know rite thank god for all that AI steaksauce Europe got from India. XD
>>1400988
What this anon said (>>1400990).
I only get to eat steak, like, once a week. Why the FUCK would you mask the taste of that delicious, wholesome beef with the pointless addition of salt or pepper? God forbid you decide to throw on some fucking ketchup or something.
As for OP's question, it's because beef and pork weren't up to our modern standards at the time. Peppers and spices helped to mask the taste of poor quality meat.
This is just my personal theory, but bear with me here. I think that's why places like Louisiana and Texas (major cattle crop states) have a longstanding tradition of smoked meats and barbecues; because they were the first to discover this new way of making meat much more palatable than it was back then. Hotter climates where refrigeration was impossible meant people had to innovate; giving rise to fried chicken (bought in by the Scots), smoked brisket (which, I believe, was first popularized in New England when it was first brought in by Le Joos), and finally, barbecued meat (debatably introduced to Western Europeans when Spaniards visited the Caribbean).
Notice how all of them came from hot or humid climates, necessitating the need for slow-cook preservation methods and the addition of carrion-combating spices? This is how American barbecue came to be, and this is why nobles went to war for the good shit; because once you've had a little piece of heaven, men would crawl and die just to get back inside.
>>1401104
You cut out the middleman and make more dosh in one trip than all your other merchant friends can make in a whole lifetime.
It's called high-risk/high-reward, son. Ain't no game.
>>1401907
I have this recurring fantasy where I go to the best steakhouse in town, and then order a steak well done and then ask them to bring me some ketchup.
>>1401911
Somebody has to pay for your boat though.
And you're going to have to make a given number of runs without being killed by your own inexperience with the stretch of ocean you're travelling along to pay back the people who financed your boat.
>>1401927
That's why you hire an experienced Captain and pay him half.
You have the know-how; he has the know HOW. Are you feeling me, "sucka"?
>>1401850
cooking raw would mean not even salt should be used
>>1401130
spices were basically drug trade of the time
it's fascinating how historically important spice trade was throughout the time
Age of Discovery, both East India companies, introduction of tea
>>1401942
It depends on the era.
This started to happen when the Portuguese began to figure out long distance open ocean sailing.
Before that, merchant shipping hugged the coast.
If you're moving on a coast you don't know very well, and you don't have the political protection of somebody who cares enough to keep you from getting pirated, you are most likely going to either crash or get robbed.
>>1401952
I was thinking more "Spain, masters of the ocean" era. I mean, by the 1600's, cartography came to the point where relatively safe ocean routes could be navigated without overwhelming distress, and though the occasional shipwreck wasn't an uncommon sight; it was more like one of those incidents that go along the lines of "oh, that won't happen to me", because the odds of it happening to "you" were pretty rare.
>>1401971
I think he was talking about the proper medieval era.
Back then, typically Arabs did most of the work, and then either the Italians or the Hanseatic League did the finishing touches, depending on whether you were in Northern Europe or Southern.
>>1401080
Pure meme. Who the fuck would be able to afford to heavily spice their food but not slaughter an animal?
>>1401987
So I did some digging.
>It is commonly believed that during the Middle Ages, pepper was used to conceal the taste of partially rotten meat. There is no evidence to support this claim, and historians view it as highly unlikely: in the Middle Ages, pepper was a luxury item, affordable only to the wealthy, who certainly had unspoiled meat available as well.[28] In addition, people of the time certainly knew that eating spoiled food would make them sick. Similarly, the belief that pepper was widely used as a preservative is questionable
I just assumed that this was true during the very late stages of the Age of Exploration.
>>1401993
Hmmm...Interdasting...
Can we all just chalk this up to the "human nature" meme once more? Would man really go to such great lengths for such an inane luxury? Would we have done the same in the shoes of the noble aristocracy? Humanity never fails to amaze me, even when I thought it already has.
>>1402009
What if...What if spices WEREN'T as popular as we think thought they were? What is spices were literally an old-timey meme food, like Sriracha, or Chipotle? What if the nobles just TALKED about spices all the time, but in real life, they were just banalities? Does anyone have any sources on how often spices were used in real life?
Maybe it was just something "one should try once in his lifetime, just to say he tried it"? Maybe that would justify the insane demand for pepper?
I don't even know anymore, man. I thought spices were a necessity for clean eating; but now? I don't even know.
>>1402049
Or what if it were the COMMONERS that were actually consuming the most spice? Like some sort of...I don't know, super-luxury? Kind of like drugs or something? Does anyone have any info on WHO'S been consuming all the spice?
>>1401219
this.
>>1400974
Changing up your palette once in a while is actually important in the long term (or it was back then) when it comes to keeping up an adequate appetite. Ever eat the same foods in the same way for several days or weeks in a row and find yourself starting to get turned of by them? Of course this isn't really a concern at all now with how easy it is to access a wide variety of foods and flavors.
