[Sca-cooks] Spices and the Irish Common folk

[Tom Vincent]

I doubt if there is any period documentation about what 14th c. common Irish (or otherwise) folk ate or what spices they had, but I'll commit to the following generalizations:
   
  1.  They didn't have any spices.
  2.  They didn't have any beef, corned or otherwise.
  3.  Beef in the timeperiod wouldn't have been fed corn ('corn', pre-maize, being generic grain), but would have been grass-fed.
  4.  The recipes you're looking at were from the nobility.
  5.  If they had any 'herbs', they would not be considered anything other than another vegetable.
   
  So, they may have 'enjoyed' a bit of cabbage, probably in the form of a soup. :)  
   
  That's about as close to 'corned beef and cabbage' a 14th c. Irish person would have likely seen.
   
  Duriel van Hansard
  Caer Adamant, East Kingdom

Helen Schultz <helen.schultz at comcast.net> wrote:
  I've been having a discussion with my father (a self-proclaimed authority on almost anything ) about the types of spices the common Irish folk might have had. This was sparked by a neighbor taking him to dinner for St. Patrick's Day and he felt the corned beef & cabbage wasn't fixed correctly . 

I did find him a fairly good recipe for it on Martha Stewart.com, but he has come back to me with the idea that the common Irish folk who invented this dish (?? did they, I don't know that, myself) just didn't have the spices necessary for making corned beef. I told him I could show him 14th century recipes in England that used most of these spices, but he countered that the common folk wouldn't have had them.

Anyway, what I need is some help finding out the real story behind not only the way corned beef came about, but also some info on the spices normally used to make corned beef. Martha Stewart corned her beef with water, pickling salt, dry mustard, pickling spices, garlic, and ground pepper. Now, pickling salt would be just good old sea salt, I'm sure. Mustard is no problem, neither is garlic... but what about pickling spices? I don't pickle, so I don't know what they are a mixture of. Pepper might have been a slight problem for a common Irishman, but was it totally un-used by them??

Any help would be welcome.

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Meisterin Katarina Helene von Schönborn, OL
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http://meisterin.katarina.home.comcast.net 

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