[Sca-cooks] Salt and pepper

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Adamantius wrote:
>It might be worth pointing out that one of those large
>food-service-sized containers of whole peppercorns, which probably takes
>me and my family about a year (maybe slightly less) to go through,
>weighs less than a pound, maybe twelve ounces or so. So if those priests
>and their servants, a household twice the size of mine, used 1.33 times
>as much pepper as we did, there are a lot of explanations for the
>difference, but it seems pretty clear they used pepper.

And here i am, i *like* spice food, i *love* spicy food (meaning all
sorts of spices) and it takes me a couple years to use one ounce of
pepper. And i don't use black pepper (except when i'm cooking
Medieval food and the recipe calls for it...), rather i use white
pepper (and i sometimes substitute this in Medieval recipes), because
something about black pepper - i think the skin of the berry - seems
to "stick in my throat", which white pepper doesn't do.

I used whole black peppercorns in the German feast, but for powdered,
i used white.

I realize i'm not following the recipes to the letter all the time,
but, well, i'd like to be able to eat what i cook without gagging.

>Re salt: some recipes do seem to specify using "enough salt", others
>caution the cook not to use too much, but make no other reference. Some
>of them probably assume it.

For the Boar Hunt, at least one of the German cookbooks - i don't
recall which, but i think it was either Rumpolt or Welser - did NOT
mention salt during the process of prepping and cooking. But
frequently one of the last things it would say was "and do not
oversalt".

As for salt, there were different grades - i think this may have been
discussed on this list, too. Really white salt (mined?) was for the
higher class people at the feast. Less white salts in several grades
(and evaporated sea salt is often greyish and there were different
grades of this, too) for different classes of diners, including those
who were not eating at table but in the kitchen or somewhere else. I
think i read this in "Fast and Feast" by Henisch...

Anahita