[Sca-cooks] Paper twists of spice (Was spice storage)

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

>Printing or decoration?  Someone could have painted the shell or 
>carved it.  Perhaps it is
>a piece of stiff cloth or decorated leather?  I know that I am 
>grasping at straws, but I am
>having a hard time with the concept that someone desecrated a book 
>to wrap spices in paper.
>::Shudder::
>
>When this painting was done in 1612 or so, printing was becoming 
>more common, but would someone
>really have torn out a page of a book to wrap spices in it?

Sure, why not? If someone had a damaged book i'm sure there were 
"recyclers" who could find other uses for it.

When i lived in Indonesia - granted, not in the 16th century :-) - 
the food i bought from merchants in the local fresh food market was 
wrapped in scrap paper, usually, but not limited to, old homework.

By the end of the 16th century there had been quite a bit of 
printing. My limited studies of 16th c. England suggest that nearly 
every family owned a bible by the end of the century (of course, it 
had to be an approved version - there were quite a few that were 
banned, and the KJV hadn't been printed yet :-). Various astrology 
manuals were fairly common, and if they had ephemera, those might 
have outdated periodically. And there were broadsides sold in the 
streets.

I'm sure that even with a limited number of books (no New York Times 
bestsellers), some got damaged and were not worth saving, so why not 
make use of the paper?

Of course, i have no hard data to back this up, and no time to look 
for it, as i'm getting ready for Beltane, which is at a lovely ranch 
about 2 hours north of here. It's a sheep ranch and they have guard 
llamas, and a neighboring ranch raises emus. Apparently nearby is an 
excellent source of verjus, so if i can get directions from another 
foodie, i'll pick up a couple bottles.
-- 
Urtatim, formerly Anahita