[Getting a feel for the crowd] So, uh, what's the deal with British food? They sure hate spices over there! And you hear they just let the cats go out wherever?
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It's a popular myth. We used to use spices a lot, then they got cheap because of Empire and rich people started not using spices but using really expensive ingredients that don't need spices, then middle-class people started copying them, then the spice imports got cut off during the World Wars.
So, come 1950, Britain had a cuisine that barely included spices at all because rich people had deliberately given them up and poor people had not had access to them for about 30 years.
We had to relearn how to use spices, but by the 1970s-1980s spices were surging back into the British diet.
Also, the traditional British spices were the Old World spices - cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, black pepper, cloves, turmeric, vanilla, etc - not the New World peppers like jalapeño or habanero, so those are relatively new to British cuisine, which can sometimes confuse Americans accustomed to them.
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We had to relearn how to use spices, but by the 1970s-1980s spices were surging back into the British diet.