I think that the main point to make about the general class of botanical aromatics is that they make foods taste nicer than they often otherwise would. Imagine for example eating….chicken. I mean, eating it as, say, cooked “chicken”, with nothing added. That is, unless this was Stalingrad and you had no options available, and you’d got somehow hold of a “chicken”, and you didn’t have anything on the above list….well, you’d burn the thing or boil it and you’d, well, eat it.
Think by contrast how ambrosial chicken tastes, when you first fry it off nicely in really thick virgin olive oil and soysauce, with really quite a lot of lemon juice and a few large spadefuls of finely-chopped garlic and fennel, you then tikka-marsalarise it, or jalfrezi- or baltiate it, and so on. Since you feel so much better after having eaten that, versus how you’d have felt in Jan 1943 in the Tractor-Factory, you probably won’t contract a lot of those lurgies listed that the herbs/spices ostensibly protect you against. (Although one or two of them might, I do accept that possibility.)
I think that the main point to make about the general class of botanical aromatics is that they make foods taste nicer than they often otherwise would. Imagine for example eating….chicken. I mean, eating it as, say, cooked “chicken”, with nothing added. That is, unless this was Stalingrad and you had no options available, and you’d got somehow hold of a “chicken”, and you didn’t have anything on the above list….well, you’d burn the thing or boil it and you’d, well, eat it.
Think by contrast how ambrosial chicken tastes, when you first fry it off nicely in really thick virgin olive oil and soysauce, with really quite a lot of lemon juice and a few large spadefuls of finely-chopped garlic and fennel, you then tikka-marsalarise it, or jalfrezi- or baltiate it, and so on. Since you feel so much better after having eaten that, versus how you’d have felt in Jan 1943 in the Tractor-Factory, you probably won’t contract a lot of those lurgies listed that the herbs/spices ostensibly protect you against. (Although one or two of them might, I do accept that possibility.)
Yummy!