r/GlobalTalk • u/LelloMinsk Portugal • Jul 28 '21
[Question] What herbs/spices/condiments are typically used in your country? Question
Hey everyone! I have a herb/spice garden and I would love to know what spices are traditionally used in your country. I'd love to know new herbs, spices and condiments I can borrow to use in my cuisine.
Thank you in advance!
21
u/TypicalPakeha New Zealand Jul 28 '21
In New Zealand the classic condiment is tomato sauce. Which is kinda like ketchup, but without the vinegar and a bit more sweet I guess. An absolute necessity when you're eating fish and chips!
0
u/Tinie_Snipah Aotearoa Jul 29 '21
Don't know how Kiwis stomach Watties, I cant stand it! Heinz Ketchup for life
24
u/LelloMinsk Portugal Jul 28 '21
Here in Portugal, the most used herbs are parsley, coriander and bay leaf.
Depending on the region, we also use spearmint, sage, pennyroyal, aniseed, thyme, marjoram, chives, fennel, basil, oregano, summer savory and rosemary.
For spices, we use garlic, onion, shallot, malagueta pepper, black pepper, star anise, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mustard, paprika, vanilla.
Condiments, we use massa de pimentão (red bell pepper paste with salt), piri-piri sauce, mayo, ketchup, tomato paste, red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar and, of course, lots of oilve oil.
HMU fellow Portuguese people if I'm missing something!
12
u/squirrelcat88 Jul 28 '21
Here in Canada we have people from all over, so I imagine you could find pretty much anything being used ( although there’s a joke that the three spices used on the Prairies are salt, pepper, and ketchup.) The one thing you probably don’t use a lot of in Portugal is maple syrup. It’s made from the sap of the sugar maple in early spring, and it’s used as a condiment on things like pancakes. It’s also used some in baking and sometimes a little bit goes into things like sauces and salad dressings.
12
u/MsRaeven Jul 29 '21
You can use it in pies, mustard as a glaze for ham, great on toast with butter... There are a lot of recipes here that use it as an ingredient. Source: Am Canadian and have a Maple Syrup Recipe Book. Sorry. 😁
Fun fact, if you're trying to be healthier, substitute maple syrup for refined white or brown sugar. It's sweeter so you use less and 100% natural so it's more easily processed by your body.
Edit: Ontario, French family. Can confirm ketchup is a spice.
3
u/mojitz Jul 29 '21 edited Jul 29 '21
Vermont has a dish called sugar on snow which consists of maple syrup, snow and... pickles.
3
u/mrrrrrrrow Jul 29 '21
The pickle part is weird but true apparently, it’s supposed to be a palate cleanser.
In that same 1939 issue of Yankee, we advised serving doughnuts and pickles with the maple syrup on snow candy, advising “the doughnuts may be used for dunking, and the pickles are eaten to overcome the sweet taste so that one may begin all over again.”
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u/AnorhiDemarche Jul 29 '21
Australia here! Lemon myrtle and wattle seed (nutty coffee taste) are both wonderful, as is tassie pepper.
6
u/PandasOnGiraffes Canada Jul 29 '21
Sumac is the national spice of Palestine and one of the primary ingredients in Musakhan. Cumin, pepper, cinnamon, paprika, and certain mixes of spices are also very popular.
5
u/SeiBellaChe Jul 29 '21
Basil, oregano, laurel, parsley, sage, rosemary are the most commonly used herbs in Italy :)
6
u/bleuest Jul 29 '21
Ginger, galangal, lemongrass, coriander, turmeric, bay leaves, lime leaves, basil, candlenut, cumin, tamarind are some of the ones used in Indonesia.
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u/arpw Jul 29 '21
The UK: Pretty much everything is used by somebody. There's hardly a single spice or herb that you could name that I couldn't find in a shop in London.
Saying that, many of the older generation have very bland taste preferences, and stay away from anything too spicy. Younger generations who grew up with multiculturalism are generally far more adventurous.
Fresh herbs like parsley, sage, thyme, mint, rosemary and basil are very widely used. Coriander and dill too, but a bit less so.
In terms of condiments there is a lot of regional variation, but one condiment that I think is unique to the UK (well, and Ireland too) is Brown Sauce. Another one is Salad Cream, which is kind of like a much sharper, tangier mayonnaise. Tomato ketchup is very widely used. English mustard too, which I'm pretty sure is the hottest type of mustard in the world. Horseradish sauce with beef, tartar sauce with fish, mint sauce with lamb, cranberry or redcurrant sauce with turkey. Hot sauces and BBQ sauces are getting more and more popular.
Then there's the world of chutneys, relishes and pickles - I won't go into that too much, but one particularly British one is Picalilli.
And of course - gravy! The brown, medium thickness type, generally made with the stock or juice from roasted meat.
2
u/WikiSummarizerBot Jul 29 '21
Brown sauce is a condiment served with food in the United Kingdom and Ireland, normally dark brown in colour. The ingredients include a varying combination of tomatoes, molasses, dates, apples, tamarind, spices, vinegar, and sometimes raisins. The taste is either tart or sweet with a peppery taste similar to that of Worcestershire sauce. Brown sauce is typically eaten with meals such as full breakfasts, bacon sandwiches and chips.
Salad cream is a creamy, pale yellow condiment based on an emulsion of about 25–50 percent oil in water, emulsified by egg yolk and acidulated by spirit vinegar. It may include other ingredients such as sugar, mustard, salt, thickener, spices, flavouring and colouring. The first ready-made commercial product was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1914, where it is used as a salad dressing and a sandwich spread. Historically, salad cream, often mentioned in Victorian sources, consisted of "hard-boiled eggs puréed with cream, mustard, salt and vinegar".
Piccalilli, or mustard pickle, is a British interpretation of South Asian pickles, a relish of chopped and pickled vegetables and spices. Regional recipes vary considerably.
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u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
Finland. Salt, mustard and ketchup. That's it really, and a thing called grillimauste. We prefer the taste of the foodstuff itself and seasoning is to cover up food that doesn't taste good.
1
u/Luutamo 🇫🇮 Finland Jul 29 '21
For once I think I agree with you. Finland is known for very bland seasoning. Though, I would add paprika and peppers (white and black) to the list. And when it comes to condiments, Finns tend to use different kind of seasoned mayos: paprika, garlic and cucumber being the most popular ones.
1
u/Volesprit31 Jul 29 '21
I'm surprised. Isn't there an aromatic plant growing on your lands in spring/summer.
0
u/Luutamo 🇫🇮 Finland Jul 29 '21
which one?
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u/Volesprit31 Jul 29 '21
I don't know. I just thought, that in the Finnish toundra there must have been some wonderful wonder of frozen latitudes that woke up in spring.
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u/Luutamo 🇫🇮 Finland Jul 29 '21
Only thing that comes to my mind is a cloudberry. We do have plenty of different kinds of berries for sure but I wouldn't of course categorize those as a herb/spice/condiment.
Can't really think any herbs like that but that could of course be just me.
-2
u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
Really our environment was only good for hunting as a food source until relatively late when agrarian settlements along with foreign agricultural crops.
Sami people are a sub-population our people who stuck to hunting until they had genocided all the forest deer / caribou, and evolved their hunting techniques of herding deer into traps into reindeer (domesticated forest deer / caribou) in the late 1700s and 1800s.
Since near settlements was no good hunting grounds, they ended up being quite isolated (etymology of lapp is remote/distant), and they therefore remained with an archaic version of a Finno-Ugric language, while the agrarian and trading population changed over to what became modern Finnish. Genetically the population distance is up to 1500-2500 years.
-1
u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
At least none used as seasoning. Aromanic plants such as pine and spruce trees don't taste any good, although they've been used for tar extraction and tar smells nice. I have a personal theory of salmiakki being something to surrogate eating poop as a snack, erased from history due to obvious reasons, but salmiakki is an industrial era product tasting similar to bunny and sheep poop, and having similar texture too. My dad's generation used to prank old people by offering them dried bunny poop from salmiakki boxes and try to keep their face straight when complimented on how good salmiakki it is.
-1
u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
Apart from peppers (mostly used in soups as whole peppercorns), the latter mayo stuff cames from late 80s or early 90s and onward as part of the industral microwave dinner "eines" subculture and didn't really catch on until 2000s.
They had no place in Finnish food culture before that and would've been nowhere to be found. Even plain mayo was specialty store stuff. Even paprika as anything but the fruit itself is a relatively late thing, and the fruit used to be super expensive before EU stuff.
Finnish law used to be so protectionistic, that stuff there was any domestic production of were simply banned, or had so high customs fees that it was pointless to import.
Available "fresh" exotic fruit was pretty much limited to banana and oranges.
I think you're a generation or two younger than me, so your view probably includes 90s and 2000s stuff as "tradition" or "Finnish" that has "always been like that".
1
u/Luutamo 🇫🇮 Finland Jul 29 '21
Well, if you can't count something to be part of tradition when it has been in use for many decades already, then that's on you.
-5
u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
Even grillimauste is a relatively late thing. Seasonings really didn't grow in Finland, and we used to be a agrarian economy before WW2 and its war reparation industrial revolution.
We were simply too poor to import food, and "Välirauha" (the era between Winter War and Continuation war in the early 1940s) along with "Suuret nälkävuodet" (1860s) and "Suuret kuolonvuodet" (late 1600s) ought to have taught us to be self-dependant.
The "Välirauha" era in particular is something we should keep in mind now. The peace negotiations at the end of Winter War included grain shipments from USSR, and they fell short on it. Simultaneously, our domestic communists were doing things they still do: sabotage. They destroyed food and fuel storages to the best of their abilities, supported by the promise of getting invaded by the glorious communist utopia of USSR.
Our leftist politicians seem to have similar policies still, but it puzzles anyone to whose benefit that is, but at least the central theme is to sabotage the well-being of Finnish nation and Finnish people. It also has some adopted American cultural imperialist elements of self-flagellation borrowed from "the woke" culture export.
4
u/Ruvio00 Jul 29 '21
Jeeeesus. You're insane.
-2
u/hajamieli Finland Jul 29 '21
Insane for citing history? What drugs are you on, did you swallong the woke pill whole?
2
u/cohenian-rhapsody Jul 29 '21
Marjoram, carraway seeds, green parsley, dill, Vegeta and then mustard, ketchup, tartar sauce, horseraddish, maggi sauce for soups in the Czech Republic
2
u/Barl3000 Denmark Jul 29 '21
Traditional Danish food culture is rooted in cheap options farmers and workers would have access to, so it may come off a bit plain.
That being said we do have a condiment that I believe is very danish, remoulade. It is a mayo based sauce with relish from cauliflower, pickles, carrots and pickled caper berries and spiced with a bit of curry.
It is as popular, if not more so than ketchup for french fries and is also used on many of our openfaced sandwhiches as garnish on top of cold cuts of meat. It is also used for fried and breaded fish, particularly plaice fillets. As that is a plentiful and very popular fish in Denmark.
1
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u/MisterTeapot Jul 29 '21
Netherlands: salt and pepper for "traditional" Dutch dishes only.
I consider traditional Dutch meals as any potato meat veg combo, e.g. mashed potato, meatball and peas/spinach/brocoli/whatever
1
u/TohaHeavyIndustries_ Germany Jul 30 '21
Salt and Pepper. Some Maggi(basically the german bastardization of Soy Sauce) and Chili if you're lucky
0
u/Volesprit31 Jul 29 '21
A mix of thyme/rosemary/oregano. Basil in the south. Bay leaves is used a lot for winter dishes like meat in sauce. But this is a staple in French houses.
As for condiment, Dijon mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup. But ketchup is considered more for kids. It's however a staple for barbecues. Mustard is the grown up thing.
58
u/fucknazis101 Jul 28 '21
All of them.
There is like a 60% chance that whatever you use has originated from us. India.