[Sca-cooks] Fine Spice, Good Spice, Sporty Spice

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

A whole nother buncha spicy questions:

A) I'm wondering if there is really a significant difference between 
"Fine Spices"/"Fine Powder" and "Good Spices"/"Good Powder"? Could it 
not be a question of translation? I'm blanking on which cookbooks 
called for "good spices" or "good powder", but i remember reading it. 
It's so annoying having lost my collection of SCA-Cooks messages 
since 1999 and all the other info i'd collected. Whoever thought we 
were soon going paperless forgot about hard drive crashes :-)

B) I recall that one cookbook (don't recall which... can anyone fill 
this in?) calls for "Fine Spices" in half the book and for "Spice 
Powder" in the other half, in the same kinds of recipes. While this 
suggests that it was compiled out of two different books, or written 
at two different times or written by two different authors, it also 
suggests that the term "Fine Spice" (or "Fine Powder") had some 
synonyms, so to speak.

C) There is a spice blend recipe "Espicias de salsa comun" - "Spices 
for a common seasoning" (or has "salsa" completely lost this meaning 
and does it only mean "sauce" by the 16th c.?) in the 1529 edition of 
De Nola (in both Robin Carroll-Mann's trans. in the Florilegium, and 
in Vincent Cuenca's trans. which i purchased at the Known Worlde 
Costume Symposium from Devra - i only regret that i had but one bank 
account to give for my "hobby"). The recipes in the book, however, 
call for "fine spices, such as..." then enumerates them, and they 
vary from one recipe to another. Am i way off base assuming that the 
Common Spice blend is basically like the earlier Fine Spice blend 
with some regional variation? In the 1529 Libro de Guisados it 
includes coriander, which seems to me to be uniquely Iberian (but 
learned from the "Moors"), as i don't recall seeing it used much 
elsewhere in period. But other than this, the "Common Spice" blend 
seems to me to be generally quite similar to other "Fine Spice" 
blends.

Anahita
one of the Spice Girls?
"Hi! I'm Medieval Spice..."