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

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> I think the main point is 'people bought their own containers'. I haven't made 
> a deliberate study of it, but I can't recall a market scene in medieval art 
> that has shoppers being given containers while I can think of several that 
> show them carrying bags or baskets.

But when it comes to apothecary shop depictions, how would you know if a 
container, say a jar, had been brought by the shopper or provided with 
the purchase? 

I have looked through a few apothecary shop depictions and have only 
found one where the goods are possibly in the process of being handed 
over, and they are in jars.

Of course one would bring a carrier of some sort for one's purchases, 
but I really have a hard time imagining people having a supply of little 
bags to take to market in case their spices were in-- and you can hardly 
just dump your grains of paradise and your cardamom in the bottom of 
your basket higgeldy-piggeldy.

But until someone comes up with a text reference to how spices were 
packaged for the consumer in period, or a picture thereof, we won't know 
for sure. I think they were kept in cloth bags in boxes, but I would 
need to do a good deal of reading to find out for sure.

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on 
imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
			-- Harry S. Truman