[Sca-cooks] Spices and the Irish Common folk

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> I also doubt that the common man was so lacking in taste buds as to not 
> differentiate between a vegetable and a seasoning.  Most herbs used for 
> seasoning are too potent to use in quantity, but a little rosemary or basil 
> in the porridge or some dill in the rye bread would certainly brighten a 
> common meal.

A lot of the green herbs were used as pot-herbs, after all, the term 
'herb' refers basically, to a non-woody green plant. And a good many 
strongly flavored herbs are mentioned in period recipes as part of 
salads, pies, and boiled greens.

However, I don't buy the idea that dill seed or fennel seed, for
instance, was treated exactly as either any other 'herb' or as any other
grain. Certain seeds-- such as hemp or flax seed-- do seem to have been
used as pottages, but I would have to see a great deal of
archaeobotanical evidence and/or written evidence to suggest that all
possibly edible foodstuffs were treated alike, and that the level was so 
far beyond subsistence and into starvation for the majority of that 
period that people ate merely from day to day. Subsistence farming is 
usually defined as when produce is used only for the producer's own 
subsistence and not for exchange; it doesn't imply indigence, but the 
provision of the necessities of live and little left over for trade.

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on 
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