[Sca-cooks] spice quality

[Stefan li Rous]

Selene asked:
<<< grizly wrote:
 > Bad cooking also consists of using spices that are years old and
 > tiome/tempuerature abused.  cinnamon is one that happened locally  
that
 > had lost nearly all essential oils to become basically colored  
chalk .
 > . . but was used in a couple of dishes featuring cinnamon.
 > Unfortunate mistake that the docs couldn't hide.

On the other hand, is this not a reasonable approximation of the
condition of spices by the time they were walked from Asia to Europe by
the Silk Road, or shipped around the Horn?  OK, it might age better if
left unground but still, something to consider. >>>

Nope, nope, nope. If the spices showed up at the market as bad as  
that, they would hardly justify the high prices for them. They  
weren't cheap. It helps that the spices were shipped from the mid and  
far east unground. We're complaining about spices costing a few  
dollars. Would you buy spices that bad for tens or hundreds of  
dollars more?

See these files for past discussions on this topic:
p-spice-trade-msg (30K)  9/ 4/04    The period spice trade. Routes,  
methods.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/COMMERCE/p-spice-trade-msg.html
spice-storage-msg (24K)  5/13/06    Period and modern spice storage.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/PLANTS/spice-storage-msg.html

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****