SC - OT - inalienable freedom of speech (and black pepper)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Of course, the notion that the cook actually did their own spice grinding is
> questionable in itself.  In all likelihood, the average person if they could
> afford spices, would have bought them pre-ground at the apothecary. Cooks for
> large manors and castles would not have ground them themselves.

In general, this is likely the case, as even a scullion had skills that
made him valuable to the Master cook, and the endless pounding would
make him unavailable for other work. If I remember correctly Chiquart
(or is it the fictional Chiquart in the Scully book?) speaks of a
special braying man whose job was to pound stuff in an enormous mortar,
for the gallons of almond milk, f'rinstance, the household would need on
a feast day... .

I also recall Le Menagier's hippocras recipe calls for both whole and
powdered cinnamon to be combined with other spices, and the whole
mixture to be ground to a powder. While hippocras powder and Duke's
powder (the pre-sweetened vesion) could be bought from apothecaries,
it's possible and even likely that the recipe is included in Le
Menagier's text because someone is expected to make it. Maybe not the
butler, but possibly one or another of the stewards he mentions (Le
Menagier may not have had a butler, and on an interesting side note,
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management describes a wide spectrum of
brewing and vintning tasks, such as racking, kegging, decanting, and
honest-to-gosh mashing of malt, etc., as part of a nineteenth-century
butler's duties.) 

As a general side note, fourteenth-century English coobooks refer to
both powder and flour of cloves, pepper, cinnamon, etc., which leads me
to assume they were pretty finely ground. It's certainly possible to
grind such spices to exceedingly fine powders by hand in a mortar, and
my own experience has been that the worst part of doing a large and fine
job with a mortar is the preliminary grousing, a function of the 20th
century mind: "I'm doing _what_? Are you nuts???" By shutting up and
buckling down the job tends to be finished in about one third the time
it would require otherwise.

Adamantius
Østgardr, East  
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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