Via Insty, I found this fascinating article about how America’s food is becoming more spicy:
Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.
When I first came over in 1982, I found American food to be kinda like what I’d left behind in South Africa: kinda bland, almost-English in fact, and diner food very much so. Only when I went south to New Orleans and Florida did the food start to spice up a little — in the Big Easy, quite alarmingly so.
Back in Johannesburg, although I’d grown up with at least one curry meal a week, spicy food was definitely not an everyday fare.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I moved Over Here in The Great Wetback Episode of 1986 I found out that over that short period, food in general had spiced up considerably (what the article refers to as “capsaicinization”), and frankly, I wasn’t prepared for it. It took me a while to get used to it, but I did.
Now? I eat nachos with one slice of jalapeño pepper per mouthful. (Without the jalapeño, nachos are pretty awful — close to what Richard Hammond once described as “sick on a plate”.)
What made me realize how my own taste had become so capsaicinized was when New Wife came over from Seffrica to become part of my life Over Here. Now granted, she’d never been that fond of spicy food — even curry, so much a staple of SA menu, was conspicuous by its absence on her table — and in fact, that was generally true of many Seffricans back in the day, myself included. So when she came here, her taste buds were set on fire. And it’s when I prepare meals for her that I realize how much I’ve become used to that increase in spice content; I have to watch out even when using mild spices like Lawry’s steak salt or paprika. What seems quite mild for me sets her mouth on fire. So I make meals accordingly.
Ditto when we visit friends or family: I have to remind them constantly to be careful of the spice quantity. (The nice thing about having the kind of friends that I do is that they take such constraints in their stride, albeit with some gentle teasing. Ditto Daughter and the Son&Heir when we visit them for dinner.)
I’m not going to try and change her tastes, by the way; had someone tried to do that to me, back in the late 1980s, I’d have kicked back hard. I may have gradually become accustomed to the modern American cuisine, but it took me well over a decade to do so.
I doubt that New Wife will do it in anything like the same time period, and that’s okay. At home, we eat more traditional British food, anyway. Sausage rolls, steak pies and roast beef, for example, were never spicy foods to begin with, and I for one have no problem tucking into the comfort foods of my youth.
I’ll just get the spice when we got out to eat.
I’m with your good lady. For me, the proper level of chilli is to wave one above the pot – from the floor above.
The first time I ate Taco Bell I was about 16 and I’ve been eating somewhat similarly ever since.
I like that shit!
My wife tends to be a picky ass about food but I have very few reservations. None the less, being the primary food preparer around here all of our meals tend toward the “bland” side to accommodate her. (during our 41 years of bliss I’ve learned that a big part of my day to day existence is to roll with the changes as she requires or be made miserable for ignoring them).
I do however make exceptions now and then, sans her, and venture into the world of “single dood” food and she isn’t part of it. My “single dood” chili will put hair on ya! lol
She accidently took a bite of that chili one time and I got to witness an oscar winning performance like you would never believe. Break out the fainting couch!
Back in the 80’s a single jalapeno would set my mouth on fire. Nowadays my taste buds can tolerate habaneros, etc., but no, I’m not gonna go near ghost peppers! Unfortunately my stomach doesn’t like that level of heat anymore, and will send me to the drug store for a box of Prilosec.
There’s a YouTube chanel called First We Feast where the host and celebrity guests eat chicken wings with sauces that start out mild – 1500 scoville units, or so, and progress through hot sauces up to about 2 million scoville units – while the host interviews his guests. Interestingly, Bill Murray seemed to be completely unphased by even the hottest sauces. It’s worth a watch.
Thanks! Took your advice, looked up that vid, watched the one with Woody Harrelson, excellent! Watch it til the end when he does a magic trick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye40f72FFac
Interesting the time period you spelled out. In the early 80’s I was still living at home, eating the food my mom made. We rarely went out and on those times it was still bland food like Luby’s. I didn’t even eat a real pizza until high school, at that was Pizza Hut. By 1986 I was out of the house and in college and man eating hot food was a thing. Part macho, part idiot, but mainly it was what it was. I always figured my personal journey into hot food was just going from my mom’s plain food to what everyone else normally ate, but now I think things really did change during that period. I don’t remember anyone ever eating fajitas in the 70’s. The very first breakfast taco I ever ate would have been late 70’s, maybe 78 or 79, they just weren’t a thing. Now they are a daily event. Working in the grocery store in 1982, the only salsa we stocked was Pace. The pickled jalapeno cans would sit on the shelf so long they’d gather dust. So yeah, there seemed to be a cultural shift in spicy food during the mid-80’s.
Also, never ate a medium rare steak until long after I left the house. People of my parents’ generation just ate them well done or not at all. Weird. Don’t even get started on the jello salad crap they served in the 70’s.
The principal benefit of heavily-spiced cuisine is that it permits you to base your dish on really tastelessly trashy meats and vegetables.
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Growing up in a home of Irish ancestry on both sides of the tree, we used all the spices; salt AND pepper. When we were really looking for spicy, we had ketchup.
Later in life I like flavorful food and sometimes a little heat. A good steak only needs S&P in sparing amounts. I do like what passes for Mexican food around here. I like I’m sure it is toned down for us gringos. Spicy Tom Yum soup from a nearby Thai restaurant is one of my favorites. I’m with the other folks about ghost peppers. Making my eyes tear up and nose run uncontrollably is not an enjoyable dining experience for me or my fellow diners so I avoid that. There is a thin line between macho and stupid. Too often people mistake doing something stupid for being macho.
For many years I used to grow my own chillies and use them to make my own sriracha sauce, including a period where I grew the hottest chillies I could to make insanely hot sriracha.
As a result of being treated six years ago for bowel cancer one of the things I have had to reluctantly ****sigh**** accept is that my days of eating not just hot, but spicy food in general are behind me. No more hot English mustard with ham, no more home made horseradish sauce with my roast beef. Being forced to give it up has really taken away a lot of the joy of eating. I basically can’t eat Indian food at all now, for example.
I like a bit of heat, but too much, and my entire head breaks out in a heavy sweat. If out in public, it’s downright embarrassing to have to ask for extra napkins just to mop my face and head with just to keep sweat from dripping on the lenses of my glasses, and having to take my hearing aids out as they’re useless when immersed in salt water. I do remember laughing at Rachel Lucas’ travails in England trying to find ingredients to make Tex-Mex dishes, as the very few “Mexican” restaurants apparently thought adding diced onions to ketchup equals salsa.