Why vegetable recipes are not very spicy
Section snippets
Background
Spices are aromatic plant materials. They come from woody shrubs or vines, aromatic lichens, parts of trees, and the roots, flowers, seeds, or fruits of herbaceous plants (Farrell, 1990). For thousands of years, spices have been used in food preparation and preservation, as well as embalming, aiding digestion, lowering blood pressure, and increasing sexual potency Dillon & Board, 1994, Govindarajan, 1985, Hirasa & Takemasa, 1998. During the Middle Ages and after, hazardous voyages were
Methods
We compiled lists of all the spices called for in the vegetable-based recipes of traditional cookbooks from the same 36 countries whose meat-based recipes were analyzed previously by Billing and Sherman (1998). The countries (Table 1) lie on six continents and represent 16 of the world's 19 major linguistic groups (Ruhlen, 1987). For each country, the mean annual temperature was calculated by averaging data from all major cities listed in Conway and Liston (1990).
A vegetable-based recipe was
Results
Among all 36 countries in our sample (Table 1), traditional vegetable-based recipes called for a mean of 2.4±1.4 spices. This was significantly fewer than the 3.9±1.7 spices/recipe called for in traditional meat-based recipes from the same countries (t=−4.00, P<.001).
Relative frequencies of use of 41 individual spices were similar in vegetable- and meat-based recipes, i.e., the curves for both types of dishes approximated negative exponentials and the same seven spices were used most commonly
Discussion
Crosscultural analyses always confront “Galton's problem” (Hartung, 1982): How to select societies for comparison that adequately represent the range of cultural variation but minimize cases where similarities are due to recent common derivation or diffusion. Independence of data points is desirable statistically but, as was discussed by Ember and Otterbein (1991) and Mace and Pagel (1994), independence of specific cultural practices often is impossible to assess. Mace and Pagel advocated using
Acknowledgements
We offer sincere thanks to the dedicated staff at Cornell University's Mann and Nestlé Libraries for expert research assistance. For helpful discussions and comments, we thank J.G. Albeck, M.C.B. Andrade, S.M. Flaxman, T. A. Gavin, D.G. Haskell, M.E. Hauber, M.D. Holland, G. Jarrow, C.M. Lau, R.C. Lloyd, C.M. Kagarise-Sherman, P. Pliner, P. Rozin, G.C. Willams, and members of Cornell's Animal Behavior Lunch Bunch. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation and the College
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