[Sca-cooks] More on long pepper, cubebs, and such....

[drakey at webone.com.au]

Philp,

This 'titbit' for Gene Anderson is fantastic.  I've slowly been infusing
passion in Mongol Cookery amongst a few people here in Australia. Thanks
ever so for posting it...

a) Are there now any other translated sources for pre-1650 asian food now
available apart from YSCY, CFHR, and Paul Buells few recipes from his paper
on the Turkicization of Mongol Food and Foodways? I've been out of the loop
for a bit.

b) There is a mention of description of a Siam dish in a 17th cent
travellers journal (I'll have to look the source up when I'm at home), do
we have any more info on pre-1650ish south east asian cookery?

c)  Many members of the Zingiberaceae family (Ginger, Galingale, Krachai
and others) are used in traditional thai recipes for single sources of
'heat'.  The last dish I redacted from YSCY (last week), Deboned chicken
Morsels used fresh ginger and sprouting ginger juice and was quite bitey...
There was Flower Pepper in the dish but not enough to make a difference. 
Was there a reason why Gene didn't mention Ginger below?  I'm assuming
either ginger wasn't relevant in his response or ginger was a minor player
in the 'heat' stakes???

d)  Gene mentions Mugwort here. I assume he's not talking  about Artemesia
Vulgaris here?  What species is he referring to?

e) I've got some dried Smartweed root (Polygonum ???) and have access to as
much Rau Ram (grows like a weed in Canberra) as I want.  Which is more
appropriate to use?  Specifically, I'm planning on attempting the Mung Bean
Wine recipe (treating it as a poorly written mashing recipe as opposed to a
leaven recipe as Sabban suggests). Which part of the plant should I be
using?

And I've made a big assumption with that recipe, that Tui Sha aromatic wood
is Sandalwood.  Would I be right there?

There's also a piper species that is native to West Africa that I suspect
was used in cooking.  Again, the info for that is at home...  Some Piper
spp. are also native to Australia so I guessing you could draw a short bow
to a conclusion that Piper spp. are native to most moist, tropical old
world areas...

I suspect some of the reasons why chillies have overtaken pepper in that
part of the world is that they are easier to prepare (chopping as opposed
to grinding) and that chillis are very easy to propagate (happy in poor
soil and little water) and grow as part of a cottage garden, fruit for a
large part of the year, not too many plants required, and increased
self-reliance.  I've travelled to parts of Thailand where when the going
got tough, the diet was rice (always white), fish sauce, and chilli and
some vegetables if they were lucky...  Just ideas... I don't pretend to be
an expert in the field of asian food, just a hack who likes to eat...

Cheers,

Drake.

>I'm involved in a conversation with Gene Anderson about Asian cookery,
>relating to something completely seperate from the discussion on Cook's
>List, and he just posted me the following, that I think y'all might find
of
>interest.
>
>Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...
>
>Yes on the peppers.  Long pepper and cubeb pepper are both very closely
>related to black pepper, and very similar.  They come from India and
>southeast Asia--I don't think anybody knows exactly where.  They succumbed
>to chiles and to the increased availability of black pepper, slowly, from
>the 1500s to the 1900s.  Grains of paradise, a.k.a. Melagueta pepper, is
>(are?) an African cardamom, genus Aframomum.  They were wildly popular in
>the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, but gave way to a variety of
>other spices as those became more available.  Indian cardamom (genus
>Elettaria) was the main beneficiary, I think.  It's the only "cardamom"
>known to the west now, except locally in west Africa where Aframomum still
>exists.  But then there are all those Asian cardamoms--the "large" or
>"brown" cardamoms of the species-rich genus Amomum.  Different species of
>this genus are used all over monsoon Asia.  To be impossibly compulsively
>authentic in your Cambodian or North Laotian cooking you'd have to seek
out
>the right species.  Actually they're all very similar and pretty
>interchangeable.  They are quite a bit like Aframomum but very different
>from Elettaria.  Elettaria has a pocket of heavy use in the Baltic area,
esp
>Finland and Sweden, because of the long history of seafaring to the Indian
>Ocean.
>Chiles not only displaced long and cubeb pepper, but also displaced native
>East Asian hot (picante) stuff like mugwort and smartweed.  Smartweed has
a
>fascinating pocket of survival in Vietnam, where a particularly flavorful
>kind exists that was too damn good to be displaced by anything.  It's rau
>ram in Vietnamese and Polygonum sp. in Latin.  (I'm not sure of the
>species--there has been controversy--it's one of those domesticated things
>of rather obscure origin.)  Hunan food was famously hot long before
>chiles--peppers, smartweed, mugwort, and Chinese brown "pepper"
>(Zanthoxylum, actually a citrus relative) being the spicy things.
>This is probably more than you wanted to know....
>Thanks very much for the correspondence!!
>best--Gene