[Sca-cooks] Spices in England

Gretchen Beck grm at andrew.cmu.edu
Sun Dec 31 00:00:24 PST 2006



--On Sunday, December 31, 2006 1:27 AM -0500 Daniel Myers 
<edoard at medievalcookery.com> wrote:

>
>
> Just some notes to put some perspective on this.
>
> I've got numbers for the occurrence of various spices in medieval
> cookbooks online at the following:1
>
> 	http://www.medievalcookery.com/statistics.shtm
>
> While these don't directly indicate the quantities of spices
> consumed, they're useful on a conceptual level.  Since sugar and
> nutmeg were specifically mentioned, I'll take a moment to extract
> their entries.

Another, spefically 16th C followup -- www.british-history.ac.uk has a 
transcription of the London port books from 1567/8. I did a quick check on 
sugar and nutmeg on the ships between September 1567 and January 1568:

Sugar (Not counting sugar candy, which is listed as a separate item): 
48,425 lbs
Nutmeg: 1650 lbs
(This is on something like 300 ships, although since most ships are making 
purchases for several different merchants, there may be three different 
records per ship for the same product.

I note too, that winter/spring appears to be sugar season, as in the 
Febuary-March records there are 51 entries for sugar (there are 
approximately 100 ships per month).

Now, assuming a London only distribution (not a very reasonable assumption, 
but what the heck), and a population of approximately 245,000 (which, 
according to <http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/dramasoc.htm> was the 
population of London in 1600), we get around a pound of sugar per person in 
London per year.

If anyone is interested in doing a more complete count, or seeing some 
numbers from the 15th C, there are also customs records from 1480/1.

toodles, margaret




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