[Sca-cooks] Poudre Forte and Other Spicy Thoughts

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

First, I'm polishing up my documentation for the Fine Powder 
competition Saturday. I wandered through the bowels of the 
UC-Berkeley library last night and found a seventh recipe within 
period and an interesting recipe called A Spice Powder for Patissiers 
in _Le patissier francois_ by LaVarenne from 1652 that is BIG on 
pepper with other spices added (the ones typical for Poudre Fine). 
There's even a spiced salt - you make the spice powder up and mix it 
with an equal quantity of salt.

So now my paper is a whole page longer - now it's seven pages - sigh, 
and i was trying to make it shorter (and it's single spaced and in 9 
point Palatino, so i've got it set up as small as i can :-) I've got 
a couple introductory paragraphs, seven recipes in their original 
languages with their translations, a couple alternate translations of 
two of them, some commentary on them, a chart comparing the 
ingredients and recipes at a glance, a conclusion, with an "epilogue" 
of the LaVarenne recipe and a bibliography that completely fills one 
whole page (and which includes the names of several people on this 
list for their personal help).

I thought it was odd that the recipes for spice powders from 1555 and 
1607 both included long pepper, which i thought was out of fashion by 
that time. If this thought of mine is right, then i would suspect the 
recipes were copied from an older cookbook. Additionally, both 
recipes use both "round pepper" and long pepper.

Second, now i've been thinking about Poudre Forte... Besides the 
recipe in the Anonymous Venetian cookbook, reproduced in Redon, 
Sabban, and Serventi, are there other period recipes for Poudre Forte?

LXXV.  Specie Negre e Forte per Assay Savore.
Specie negre e forte per fare savore; toy mezo quarto de garofali e 
do onze de pevere e toy arquanto pevere longo e do noce moscate e fa 
de tute specie.

LXXV.  A Strong Black Spice for Enough Sauces.
A black and strong spice for making sauces; take half a quarter of 
cloves and two ounces of pepper and take as much of long pepper and 
two nutmegs and make of all a spice.

Ludovico Frati, ed., Libro di Cucina del Secolo XIV, Livorno: 
Raffaello Giusti, Editore, 1899, p. 40.

Third, i have a fondness for Cubebs, although the ones i get now are 
nowhere near as delicious as the ones i got in the mid-1970s.  Do any 
spice blends call for cubebs or are they usually added on their own?

Anahita