[Sca-cooks] Food in 1632? sorta OP/OT

[Barbara Benson]

> Olaf> Recently one of the writers wrote a very good story about food-but
had the
> German peasants complaining about how much meat the uptime hostess wasted
on
> each meal & that the food was too spicy (spaghetti & chili).

Greetings,

Specific to the items you have mentioned there are some problems. Unless all
of the food staples were sent back in time with them they would not have had
avialable to them the following ingredients common to these foods:
Chili:
Chili powder commonly contains ground dried chiles, it also includes cumin,
oregano, cloves, coriander, pepper, and salt. They would not have had access
to the chili's
No Tomatos
Ground beef as we know it probably would not have been available (someone
else might have better insight on that.)

Spaghetti:
Foremost Tomatos, and even if she had the sauce with her I would have
reservations as to weather or not she could have convinced the people to eat
them.
The pasta itself, while they would have had pastas, the modern extruded
"spaghetti" would have been unavailable. She would have had to make her own.
Bell Peppers - a capsium pepper indiginous to the New Wold, just like the
Chili Peppers.

As far as spicy food goes, as good Philp pointed out they did have plenty of
heat. Along with mustard you have the various peppers and pepper like spices
that were used lavishly: black pepper, long pepper, grains of paridise. And
both garlic and ginger can produce a substantial amount of heat. I have made
a garlic sauce that would take your eybrows off. They also had horseradish
and used it for sauces, and if you don't think horseradish can pack some
punch try a hunk of wasabi.

As Johanne said, the texts we work with commonly are at best late 16th
century, some changes were bound to have occured. In Rumpolt (also late 16th
http://clem.mscd.edu/~grasse/GK_Rumpolt1.htm) there is an entire chapter
devoted to Turkey and how to prepare it. So some new world foods were being
used. But many were slow to catch on - Turkey was the forerunner. In my
mustard experiments, the mustard out of Rumpolt was the spiciest that I
prepared. One stalwart dunked a hunk of bread in and I said "that is really
spicy" and he just smiled like I was a wuss. He spent the next 10 minutes
turning funny shades of red, sweating and tearing up. I suggested he eat
more plain bread.

My personal opinion, compared to medieval dishes, most modern dishes are
mildly spiced. With our use of capsium peppers we do have heat, heat, heat
but frequently at the expense of flavor. Just because something is not
"spicy" does not mean it is not higly spiced. I would think that the
"uptime" people would have a more difficult time adjusting to the medieval
foods (and not because they were rotten) than the other way around.

Glad Tidings,
Serena da Riva