[Sca-cooks] Historic Near East Spice Boxes

[Sharon Gordon]

This is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!  Thanks for doing it.

For the current analysis, I'd love to know about salt usage.

For an expanded analysis, I'd enjoy knowing about:
1) What the percentages look like if you break murri down into its component
parts and then add those to their various categories.  For a modern recipe
as an example, how does it affect the basil count if pesto is broken down
into its ingredients?
2) A similar analysis for the sweets.
3) What you have done already plus the sweets for combined totals.
4) For each book, the nonsweet and sweet compared.
5) A comparison table with all four sweet and nonsweet.
6) A comparison table with all the nonsweets in one column and all the
sweets in one column.  Here the nonsweets from both books would be combined
and new overall percentages would be calculated.  Ditto for the sweets.

Other ideas for the current analysis:
1) It might be that the lemon balm could be counted as one of your souring
agents. Maybe the citron leaves too.
2) If the recipes don't specify exact amounts for the herbs and spices, you
might want to word your spice box parts count a bit differently.  For
example, envision a recipe that calls for 1 cup of parsley and 1 teaspoon of
ground black pepper.  If you are counting the number of recipes parsley and
pepper are in, this recipe would add one to each count.  By volume though
you have 48 parts more parsley than pepper. (And by weight this count of
parts might be something other than 48 to 1.)  So if you were stocking the
kitchen, and made this recipe a lot, you'd use a lot more parsley than
pepper.

For future projects, I'd enjoy seeing similar analyses for:
1) Fruits including implied fruits such as the grapes in grape wine vinegar,
or implied from a certain kind of honey.  Any info on varieties by name or
description?
2) Vegetables and vegetable categories (roots, fruits, greens, seeds, seed
pods, etc) Any info on varieties by name or description?
3) Grains including implied grains in fermented products.
4) Meat and animal products including parts specified
5) Fats and oils
6) Cooking methods
7)  Value added products--recipes for and recipes used in.  Including value
added products as a step of a recipe.
8) Condiments (probably a subset of #7)
9) Preservation methods explicit or implied.
10) Beans, pulses, legumes
11) Crossing the cookbooks with import and trade route knowledge of their
times.  What percent of the recipe ingredients are local, semi-local, and
imported? What percent is imported from where?
12) Liquids and beverages
13) Cooking implements and utensils, explicity or implied, maybe part of
cooking methods #6.
14) Flowers and flower derivatives eaten
15) Any recipes for non food items?  If so what categories do they fall
into? Household cleaning, personal cleaning, toiletries and adornment, dyes,
medicine, other domestic arts?
16) Recipes which contain ingredients with significant or minor
anti-bacterial properties.
17) Spice and herb mixes.  Are there sets of herbs and spices that occur
frequently together?  Can you get a sense of the proportions on any of
these?  If you were a spice and herb merchant of that time, what would you
call the mixtures for any that are not already named? For (modern) example:
taco spices, chili mix, pumpkin pie spice, italian herb mix, spinach dip
mix, herbs of Provence.
18) Forms of herbs and spices--fresh, dried, ground, chopped, leaves, seeds,
dropped in whole and then fished out before serving, sauteed in a flavor
carrier such as oil?
19) Sauces--separate and as parts of other recipes.
20) Breads
21) Types of sweets--how would you categorize them and their component
parts?
22) Recipe occasions.  Do any recipes indicate that they are for special
events, occasions or times such as holidays, when the X are ripe, weddings,
new mothers, people ill with a particular malady, religious constraint or
feast days, morning or evening?

And having posted a wish list :-), please let me say that I realize that
this is easily 10-20 years of A&S projects if all done by one person.

Sharon
gordonse at one.net