• celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      Because white people have had a historical power dynamic over the rest of the world, we’ve destroyed cultures, assimilated ingredients, and then decided to make our food the most uninspired and bland dishes possible. Targeting historically oppressed people to tell them their food sucks is punching down and the opposite of good humor.

  • pseudo@jlai.lu
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    3 days ago

    Your cultural horizon must be very small if you think it is something specific to white people.

  • Hegar@fedia.io
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    4 days ago

    I always think of white people as the ones complaining about raisins in food. So many delicious savory dishes with raisins from the Middle East or India provoke strong reactions from western pallets used to food that only does 1 thing, rather than combining multiple flavours.

    • Shapillon@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Yeah that’s strange, I always associated raisins in food as something ranging from Morocco to Bangladesh. Not the whitest countries ever.

      Imho in general European food isn’t very keen on sweet and salty mixes. Except for the USA who does it all wrong smh.

      • wieson@feddit.org
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        4 days ago

        We have a few potato and apple combinations in the Rhineland.

        Also goose with quince or pear are present in french cuisine.

        I think traditional European cooking has many similarities with south med/ near east cooking. Don’t lob us in with modern American randomness.

        • Shapillon@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I’m not very familiar with German cooking though (if that’s what you meant by Rhineland) so if you got some tips and/or must tries please enlighten me :3

          edit: I removed most of my message since it added nothing to the discussion.

        • Hegar@fedia.io
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          4 days ago

          You can find isolated examples from western cuisines (often rich people food) but mixing savoury and sweet is still an exception. You don’t get things like how palm sugar is used in so many savory staples from SE Asian. Applesauce or quince paste aren’t as ubiquitous in western food as chutney is in Indian.

          I’ve also just met way more westerners who talk about salty/sweet mixes being gross. Raisins in rice, pineapple on pizza and fruit in salad are all things I’ve heard (mostly americans or australians) react strongly to.

          • wieson@feddit.org
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            4 days ago

            I can not agree. As I said, potato and apple meet in half of my regional dishes. And those are farmer’s food, not rich.

            Scandinavian and Alpine dishes love lingonberry sauce on dark meat or schnitzel.

            I think the best way, is to not think of “western cuisine” as a thing that exists uniformly.

            PS: obviously we cook differently than SE Asia, but red cabbage is sweet, carrots are sweet and caramelised onions are sweet. And they are really often used with savory dishes.

            • Loki@discuss.tchncs.de
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              3 days ago

              Lingonberry sauce on meat, ham on melon, apple in coleslaw… Apple sauce on hash browns! I think every cuisine has combinations like that, but the specific ingredients are location specific.

      • moonbunny@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Raisins inside empanadas should be a sin- I don’t like having a sweet surprise in what should be a mouthwatering savoury meal

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Raisins in empanadas aren’t universal. Here in colombia they don’t usually include them.

      • kemsat@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        I learned how to make empanadas so that I could make them without the raisins my mom would add.

    • disgrunty@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I love raisins in my curries because they actually add depth of flavour but when they’re in something like granola, you just know it’s filler. Also it ruins the texture if it’s in something crunchy because of the sudden squidge and I hate how these little fuckers get stuck in my teeth when they’re dry.

      Sorry, I think this post unleashed years of raisin resentment. But yeah I completely agree that people who don’t like them in curries or other savoury dishes are missing out because that slight sweetness is wonderful.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Yeah, those are the cuisines I associate with raisins

      I think white people just try to make their food as hot as possible and don’t pay any mind to other flavours

      • disgrunty@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        White person (UK) here. Honestly, you’re overestimating a lot of us.

        My own mother will just add curry powder, veg, and chicken chunks to a pot of chicken stock and call that curry. It is an abomination. I haven’t eaten it in years and it haunts my nightmares still.

  • Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com
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    4 days ago

    Alright, bear with me here.

    Back in the middle ages Europeans didn’t have access to sugarcane. Because of that, they never even thought to try to breed sugary beets and process those into sugar. The same was true for tree sap or any other possible source of sugar, because why the hell would it even occur to them if they’d never seen sugar?

    If a person in the middle ages wanted to make something sweet, their choices were to add honey or to add fruit. Honey was expensive, and the vast majority of the population of Europe were peasants. Honey wasn’t something they’d have around all the time. While fruit was way easier to come by, it was only available seasonally. So how do you make a sweet cake in the middle of winter? Dried fruit!

    So here’s the big kicker about putting raisins in shit: it’s been unnecessary for four goddamned centuries. There might be an occasional dish here or there that’s been made the same way since before sugar was available, but there’s no fucking excuse for it in like 95% of dishes. We live in an age where I - a regular dude who isn’t particularly wealthy - can go to the grocery store a mile away and find a dozen kinds of produce that were shipped from the other side of the planet where they’re in season. There hasn’t been an excuse to ruin perfectly innocent cookies with raisins for hundreds of years.

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Also your explanation doesn’t cover why those recipes now include a diabetes inducing amount of sugar on top of the dried fruits

      • Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com
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        3 days ago

        That’s a separate issue that we (meaning humanity, not just America) is still dealing with.

        During the second world war chemists figured out how to make cheap fertilizers and pesticides from petroleum. These two innovations shot farm productivity through the roof. Food became more abundant than ever before and therefore became incredibly cheap. Virtually overnight the biggest challenge to people’s diets was having too much, not too little.

        For the first generation or two living in this historic abundance, they had no way of seeing the coming health threats. Coming off of literally the entire history of life on this planet having too little to eat instead of too much, they weren’t with a “more is more” approach. Cost of ingredients was no longer a barrier to adding more sugar, more salt, and more fat. At least in the US, there was a brief “convenience” fad in cuisine in the 11950s, but gears quickly shifted to increasing portion size and improving taste by the brute force addition of more salt and sugar.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      There hasn’t been an excuse to ruin perfectly innocent cookies with raisins for hundreds of years.

      Counterpoint: The Great Depression

      • BodePlotHole@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        It’s like “New Chicken Salad! Now with juicy blisters!”

        Best case scenario it doesn’t make it worse, but it defo doesn’t make it any better.

        In my opinion… On the internet…

  • JoeTheSane@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Seriously! The only reason oatmeal cookies get a bad rap is because of the fucking raisins!

  • 0ops@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    Whatever dude, now I can’t stop thinking about Grandma’s cinnamon-raisin bread

  • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Any food where raisins would actually work, dried cranberries or blueberries would be 100x better. This would be things like pastries, bagels, trail mix, etc. Not stuffing, tuna, mac-n-cheese or other savory dishes.

    No one ever needs to question if what they just bit into was a rat turd or a fly.

      • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        That would be more on the savory side, given that it usually has a lot of garlic in it. Though, if it weren’t, cranberries would work better.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I’m convinced that raisins are only popular because they were a luxury food for our grandparents and they only exist in these dishes because that’s what our grandparents thought rich people would do with raisins when they were kids.