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

[Sue Clemenger]

I always figured such labels were the medieval and renaissance 
equivalent of modern labels such as "pie spice," "Italian seasoning," 
and Mrs. Dash.
--maire, laughing at the idea of medieval spice girls, and picturing 
this set of bobble-head dolls done as different members of SCA-Cooks, 
each dressed in an outfit from a different time & culture (although His 
Grace would have to have some sort of sign--perhaps as tiraz bands? 
saying that saffron was a scribal error....)

lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:

> 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..."
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