[Sca-cooks] spice mixes

[Philippa Alderton]

--- Mercy Neumark <mneumark at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Do you all have any recipes for these mixes?

Actually, I think there have been quite a few recipes
given out for poudres douce and forte- have you
checked the Florilegium? It's just the sort of thing
Stefan collects.

 I've
> been TRYING to do
> research on period curries and this was mentioned on
> one of the websites.
>
> On a similar note, do any of you have any good
> websites you can turn me too
> in regards to curry history?  I found a few but most
> of them don't go into
> detail about the history (and I can't tell how
> accurate they are).

Well, there's a problem there. You would certainly
find several recipes for period spice mixes, but
curries are an Indian-esque thing. Curry powders as we
know them, resulted from the English in India, about
the 18th century, bringing mixes back from India as
Indian curry, but the Indian cooks themselves never
packaged things quite that way. Their take on the
situation has always been to mix the spice blends in
the foods as they were cooking them, so that while
they might, for example, have both cardamom and cumin,
in lamb, chicken, or vegetable dishes, the proportions
would differ according not only to whichever of these
they were cooking, but whatever the other ingredients
might be, just as any other good cook might do.

Also, if you can get your hands on Paul Buell's "Soup
for the Qan", he was telling me about several of the
dishes that he had tried, which although they were
essentially one-pot meals, done in the Mongol style as
they were adopted by the Chinese, might also provide a
starting point for curried dishes as they are known
today. He told me that several are quite hot, even
without the use of our New World hot peppers.

But, I'm sure you could get quite a few decent modern
recipes by doing a search for "curry" on the "Net...

Phlip, who actually does know a bit about foods other
than those containing capsicum.

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