One of my pet peeves is when you go into a restaurant or a food truck and the server asks you if you want “spicy” food. Typically you get one of three choices: “not-spicy”, “medium-spicy” or “very spicy”.
There are hundreds of different spices in the world. We beneficiaries of the global economy have access to a huge palette of wonderful and interesting flavors.
But that’s not what is happening here. Almost invariably, when the server says “spicy”, they aren’t asking you whether you want garlic, rosemary or oregano on your food.
They are asking if you want chili peppers. Or more generally, they are asking if you want some capsicum-derived product.
It seems sad to think that the meaning of the word “spicy” has gradually decayed to mean just one particular kind of spice. I think this is a tragedy, because it represents a narrowing of the culinary possibilities available to us.
I also think that capsicum is not particularly flavorful — it’s just hot. Another one of my pet peeves is restaurants that take what is essentially bland, flavorless food and try and make it more “interesting” by adding chili to it. This results in hot, bland food in my opinion.
Part of the problem is that we don’t actually have a word in English to mean “capsicum-flavored”. The adjectives we tend to use are either “spicy” (which technically could mean any spice), and “hot” (which confuses the burning sensation of capsicum with temperature), both of which are unsatisfactorily imprecise.
Perhaps there is already a word in some other language that can suit this purpose; or perhaps we need to make up a new word.
Leave your suggestions in the comments below :)
