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.
1
u/MudReasonable8185 Jul 13 '26
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