[Sca-cooks] No sugar - too much spice.

[david friedman]

>	One thing I recall reading (I believe in a "cookbook"
>printed from a website many years ago -- so I have to say I can't
>quote the source) is that some measures have changed between
>Medieval times and now.  The cook whose account I was writing
>told of making a dish to the exact specifications of a Period
>recipe, only to have the thing turn out almost inedible because
>of extreme spiciness/sweetness.  Unhappily, they put together a
>new, more palatable, and, s/he thought, less accurate redaction.
>Later on, however, talking to a scholarly friend, s/he found out
>about the change in weights and measures, and when s/he worked
>out the "corrected" spicing from the original recipe . . . it was
>almost identical to the "modernized" version!  The author then
>concluded that Medieval folks were not spice-crazed maniacs, we
>just aren't familiar with their measurements.

This sounds like a description of my experience with Le Menagier's
Hypocras recipe.

The recipe gives wine by volume, sugar and spices by weight. I made
it, assuming that the units had their modern meanng. It wasn't almost
inedible, but it was sweeter and more heavily spiced than I liked. So
I cut the sugar and spices in half, which gave me a result I liked.

Years later, in an online discussion, I mentioned that. Someone asked
if I had checked on the units of measure in Paris in the late 14th
century. When I replied that I had not, he provided the information.
It turned out that the units of weight (ounces) were about the same
as the modern ones, but the unit of volume (quart) was almost twice
as large. So by correcting it to taste, I had gotten to about the
right ratio of sugar and spice to wine.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/