"In Europe, meat was considered the manliest, strongest component of a meal," Laudan notes, and chefs wanted it to shine. So they began cooking meat in meat-bas

"In Europe, meat was considered the manliest, strongest component of a meal," Laudan notes, and chefs wanted it to shine. So they began cooking meat in meat-based gravies, to intensify its flavor. Main thesis. Interestingly enough, the European pallate has also had a dterimental effect on some oriental and african cuisines athat were historically more spicy. That bein said, history doesn't really bear out the main thses as laid out in the headline. Spices were a very late addition to the european pallatte, and the timeline give for their retrenchment would put them at a very small proportion of the timeline of historical europe. In other words, "the spice" era was merely a short lived fad. For most of its history spices were rare and not very widespread in usage, then they were available, and then they were superseeded with other technical innovations. The technical innovation of stock based sauce is a derivative of increasing economic wealth. But the snob factor is really a poor way to phrase it. It is more true that the european pallate took the spice out of middle-eastern and north african cuisine based on the snob-factor. This makes more sense because the status of european pallate was seen as being higher than local cuisinge during the colonial and post-colonial transition peirods. That is, it was social aspiration driving the trend, not technical innovation. Its much less clear that a similar explanatory sequence works for the evolution of the euroean pallate itself.