[Sca-cooks] Spices and the Irish Common folk

[Volker Bach]

Am Freitag, 24. März 2006 19:00 schrieb Helen Schultz:
> I've been having a discussion with my father (a self-proclaimed authority
> on almost anything <grin>) 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 <sigh>.
>
> 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.

I think the first question is 'when'? During the 17th and 18th centuries, you 
had a rural "trade revolution" in most of Western Europe. Pedlars came oput 
into the villages in increasing frequency and brough what had hitherto been 
luxury items - town-made cloth, ribbons, brass buttons, steel needles, 
pewterware, dyestuffs and spices, among many other things. It wasn't that 
these would have been unavailable before, but their availability increased 
greatly, especially for folk in more remote locations who didn't usually 
travel to markets. At around the same time, the price of spices wet into 
freefall due to oversupply (at one point, the VOC burned tons of nutmeg on 
its wharves in Amsterdam rather than allow the devaluation to continue). So 
it is not at all out of the question that Irish 'commoners' would have had 
access to pepper and other spices in the 1600s, and by the 1700s they almost 
certainly did, at very reasonable prices. Before that, it is increasingly 
unlikely, though we should not underestimate the rural appetite for small 
luxuries even at a very early period. 

The other question is, what level of 'common folk'? Ireland in the 1700s and 
early 1800s went through a population explosion of third-world proportions, 
and a growing army of cottars found themselves with a livelihood consisting 
of a patch of potatoes, pasturage for one cow or goat, and a field to grow 
wheat or oats to pay rent. These people are unlikely consumers of spices of 
any kind in quantity. On the other hand, there were always substantial 
peasants and farmers, small tradesmen and such, who could afford them and 
probably did. At least, we know that tea and sugar were traded inland from 
Dublin, so there must have been a marklet for these small luxuries. 

I would think that Ireland lagged behind in the spread of these articles, but 
like much of Central Europe did get them. Of course the poorest (of which 
category there were many in Ireland) would always have to scrimp and save, 
but the awful truth is that our folk cuisine usually doesn't come from the 
poor, it comes from the respectable folk of the countryside and mostly dates 
to the 18th and 19th centuries. No reason they shouldn't have used pepper and 
spices fairly early. 

Volker


	

	
		
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