[Sca-cooks] Cardamom?

[AEllin Olafs dotter]

Sorry it took me a while to get to this.

I've been working with the Libellus de Arte Coquinaria. If you recall, 
this is a collection of Northern European manuscripts that are clearly 
copies/translations of a single original text, which itself is lost. It 
is believed that the original was from Southern Europe, though we don’t 
know where, but it clearly was used in the North. The extant copies are 
in Danish, Icelandic, and German, and have enough variation that they've 
been through several versions.

Out of the 39 recipes (with variations) I found 2 with cardamom. Each is 
in 3 of the 4 manuscripts.

K6 (the editors consider K the base text) is A Sauce for Lords.

“One takes cloves and nutmeg, cardamon (sic), pepper, cinnamon – that is 
canel – and ginger… “

The Danish is “cardomomum.”

Q, the other Danish text, leaves cardamom out of the same recipe, Q5, 
though it is otherwise the same. D6, the Icelandic, and W59, the Low 
German, are essentially the same as K6, including “cardemomium” and 
“cardemomen.”

K23 is Another Way of Preparing Chickens. It tells you to “grind pepper 
and cinnamon and cardamon” - “cardemomum, “ as does D20. Q25 tells us to 
take the same spices ground. (“Kard(ae)momum” in the Icelandic.) There 
is no version of this recipe in the Low German Ms.

Long way of saying Yes, Anahita, cardamom is used in actual Medieval 
recipes! And in Scandinavia, at that.

BTW, the editors spell it "cardamon" throughout, though I've always used 
the spelling "cardamom" as we have in this thread. Don't know what 
that's about.

AEllin

lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:

> I was wondering whether anyone has found SCA-period European recipes 
> that call for cardamom. While I have found SCAdians' "redactions" that 
> use it, especially in spice blends, I can't think of any period 
> European recipes that actually call for cardamom.
>
> I'm just curious, because there are so many other Asian spices that 
> were used in Europe that are no longer, such as long pepper, galangal, 
> and grains of paradise. Why not cardamom?
>
> Anahita
>