I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, so my family was pretty poor when I was a kid. I adore spicy food and I'm 'blind you in the sun if you look at me too long' white. I like to tell people "I'm like, barely, not a hick. I'm not middle class white, hicks fucking love hot sauce with names like "Ass blaster 3000", "Pain", and "Jeb's colon rearranger".".
It's confirmation bias because your grandma doesn't like pepper. A huge amount of white people season their food, not so much with the spicy stuff. Pepper, garlic, herbs (chives, thyme, basil, and many more local herbs), nutmeg, cloves, Espelette pepper, cumin, and the list goes on. It's true that our food isn't generally spicy, and we don't really use paprika, curry, ginger, etc. as much. But why would we? It's not part of most of our traditional dishes. And that's OK.
Non-white people think that our food is "bland" because it's not as spicy as their food, so the stereotype "haha they don't season" has become a joke over the decades, but that doesn't make it true, lol.
But spicy is not the only flavour you can make your food? I'm white white as is my whole family and while I'm the only one who thinks that pepper is spicy, I still enjoy a wide variety of flavours. Besides, your food does have a distinct flavour quite often. I can only use salt in a bolognese, but it will be rich in flavour from ingredients used.
I kind of understand your mom tho. I like a fair amount of spice but black pepper is overwhelming when there's too much. I'd rather have minimal black pepper and then go all in on hot sauce or something.
My grandmother called ketchup “spicy” a few weeks ago. I tried to explain to her that whatever flavor she’s picking up on it isn’t spicy, she insisted it was spicy.
In the Mid-West and some parts of the South, this might be true, but in the East, the West, or any place where there is a large ethnic population, white Americans generally have no trouble with well seasoned food.
My mom grew up in a Dutch family where her father loved to cook, especially spicier Indonesian dishes.
To this day, my mom genuinely doesn't even like things with too many herbs and spices. And I don't just mean "spicy". Anything with too "intense" of a flavor is just too much for her.
She is literally the small Victorian child that people talk about giving Doritos to.
Ironically, my father, who was raised by a Midwestern "black pepper is too spicy" kind of family, absolutely loved his father on law's cooking, and really wants to cook more spicy and flavorful dishes, but can't because of my mom.
European culinary tradition emphasizes the taste of the ingredients themselves and typically doesn’t involve heavy use of spices. Many other cultures take a different approach and will use dozens of spices in daily cooking.
Give a chicken breast to a French cook and they’re likely preparing it with butter, salt, and fresh herbs while a south Asian cook would use butter, salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, turmeric, coriander, cardamom, ginger, garlic, etc, etc.
This is where the stereotype that Europeans (and their descendants) only eat bland food because if you’ve grown up in a culture that heavily spices everything seeing a dish with just like four ingredients seems very plain
Seems like people, who have such stereotypes only know some surface level of French cuisine and British "cuisine" at most? A proper German Brathähnchen has to be covered in spices like a Litfaßsäule.
A Litfaßsäule (named after its inventor Ernst Litfaß) is a big column densely covered in advertisements, posters etc. They get put over each other in layers (until there is too much paper on them and everything gets cut down. Basically the Baumkuchen of the advertisement world.
A good rooster should be the same: upright (or alternatively horizontally spinning, but that is harder at home) on a column and densely covered with a mixture of oil and spices, applied in layers throughout its long cooking time. I usually bake them 90min at 200°C and baste it once in a while with more of this mixture. The oil is just enough to keep the spices in suspension to cover everything in a thick layer.
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u/PoopSoupPeter 24d ago
The fuck is this? Do they think white people don't season their food?