sca-cooks Re: Re(2): Spice Use and Food Poisoning, etc.

[Stephen Bloch]

> I've noticed the avoidence of "new world" foodstuffs, but my
> understanding of history was that Europeans were visiting the "new
> world" before 1600 (1492 comes to mind for some biazzare reason -wasn't
> some viking sailing around then? =8^) Is it that the exportation of
> foodstuffs to Europe didn't begin until after period? My knowledge of
> late 15/16/17th centuries is more than a little rusty...

Cariadoc has an article in his Miscellany which discusses this in a
bit of detail: Cooking from Primary Sources

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/cooking_from_primary_sources.html

As an example:

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Corn

The earliest reference in the OED to maize, the British name for the grain that
Americans call corn, is from 1555. All of the pre-1600 references are to maize
as a plant grown in the New World. Knowledge of maize seems to have spread
rapidly; a picture of the plant appears in a Chinese book on botany from 1562.
Pictures appear in European herbals from 1539 on. Finan concludes that they
represent at least two distinct types of maize, one similar to Northern Flints,
the other similar to some modern Caribbean varieties. Grains are variously
described as red, black, brown, blue, white, yellow and purple.

How soon did maize become something more than a curiosity? Leonhard Fuchs,
writing in Germany in 1542, described it as "now growing in all gardens" [<i>De
historia stirpium</i>-cited in Finan]. That suggests that in at least one
European country it was common enough before 1600 so that it could have been
served at a feast-although I know of no evidence that it in fact was, and no
period recipes for it. As evidence that it would not have been served at a
feast, John Gerard wrote, in 1597: "We have as yet no certaine proofe or
experience concerning the vertues of this kinde of Corne, although the
barbarous Indians which know no better are constrained to make a vertue of
necessitie, and think it a good food: whereas we may easily judge that it
nourisheth but little, and is of a hard and euill digestion, a more convenient
food for swine than for man" (Crosby). Gerard's conclusion seems still to be
widely accepted in Europe. In West Africa, however, Maize was under cultivation
"at least as early as the second half of the sixteenth century..." and in China
in the sixteenth century (Crosby). There is also one reference to its being
grown in the Middle East in the 1570's (Crosby).

Before leaving the subject of maize, I should mention that there have been
occasional attempts to argue that it either had an Old World origin or spread
to the Old World prior to Columbus. Mangelsdorf discusses the arguments at some
length and concludes that they are mistaken.

I know of no evidence that either corn starch or corn syrup was used in
period.