The Flavors That Define American Cuisine
Contrary to its bland reputation, American food has been spicy from the start.
Ever since she spent a summer baking cakes in a living-history museum, Sarah Lohman has been fascinated by old recipes: collecting them, cooking from them, and reading them to try to understand the lives of generations past. She noticed that, over the years, different flavors have come and gone. For example, rosewater was the standard flavoring for desserts and baked goods in colonial America, until vanilla took its place. Lohman gradually assembled a timeline of taste, charting the arrival and disappearance of different flavors in American cuisine. From that, she distilled a list of eight flavors that became popular at different moments in American history—and have remained favorites ever since.
In this episode, Lohman introduces us to the historical and biological secrets behind two of those winning flavors: black pepper and Sriracha. Black pepper is such a staple that it's hard to imagine the American dinner table without it. But we have a grumpy Massachusetts colonial-era merchant and his much friendlier son, as well as the Food Network and a pain-inducing chemical called piperine, to thank for the spice's ubiquity today.
Sriracha is the latest addition to the American flavor palate, with everything from Sriracha-flavored potato chips to Sriracha baby food sweeping the market. But how on earth did a Vietnamese spicy sauce used to pep up roast dog become a staple on the shelves of Walmart? Join us this episode as we find out the history and science behind these flavors’ successes—and survive our first, and, we hope, only, black-pepper tasting session.
This post appears courtesy of Gastropod.