Making a load of special dishes for someone waiting to see the new moon - being busy meant I kept me mouth shut on that one - I dabbled in lots of flavours that intruders into the kitchen had never heard of.

So round one for starters, there's Kewra. I can only get kewra water here in specialist shops  - but  even one bottle of that should last several generations.  It is very strong and tiny amounts go into many subcontinental dishes - not that you ever see it mentioned in recipes, it is added in the home to  biryanis, sweetmeats and sweet sevyan....... a visitor from the far east nearly had a collapse yesterday as she saw me throw a heap of noodles into a large  pan of 3 pints of hot milk to get the seyvian  started... when I added sugar she left the room.......loads of other stuff was later added and finally a very carefully measured half teaspoon of kewra. This dish is a mandatory offering when making the social calls at feast times - one only takes a little because the next house will offer it and so on.... and all taste slightly different depending on the nuts  cardamon and kewra. Tomorrow I might have a post here about cardamon ... hope MM has some thoughts on that one.

So people of yore took on the dangers of the sea to find spice - and its not all about nutmeg and cloves. either. The wonder of it all is that having been part of  opening up the world in this search for spice we never got much further past a diet of boiled meat cabbage and steam puds for yonks.

Priscilla wrote:

The wonder of it all is that having been part of  opening up the world in this search for spice we never got much further past a diet of boiled meat cabbage and steam puds for yonks.

In the high middle ages, when the importation of exotic spices was still entirely dependent on very tenuous supply chains across Mongol-ravaged deserts or pirate-plagued seas, and with the actual goods passing through the successive hands of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic and Venetian middlemen - who all, of course, took their cut - the final customers at the end of the the line, the English, actually seem to have adored very spicy food (if they could afford it). However that might well have been just because the spices were so very expensive: the nouveau-riche flaunting their cash is a very old phenomenon, whether it be modern footballers and modern city bankers, or medieval wool merchants and medieval city bankers.

Nevertheless English (and indeed most European) recipes from the 13th to 17th centuries often read very much like modern 'curry' cookbooks with their extensive, perhaps rather brash and even reckless use of a cornucopia of different spices. Medieval English recipes of the time make frequent and copious use of spices such as black pepper, long pepper, nutmeg, ginger, galangal, cinnamon, cumin, cassia, cloves, cardamon, cubeb, tumeric, tragacanth, asafoetida, sandalwood, grains of paradise, spikenard and star anise (some of which are fairly uncommon in England even today). And of course in the middle ages most of these new spices were just additions to the existing repertoire of long-established European flavourings, such as mustard, nigella, dill, fennel, rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, saffron, coriander, rue, sorrel, lemon-balm, horse-radish and wormwood etc. Nevertheless it was exactly this home demand for exotic spices that drove the likes of Drake and da Gama to try and bypass all the middlemen and so obtain them direct from source.

Yet as you say England ended up three centuries later with a trading empire that spanned the globe, whilst at exactly the same time it had Mrs Beeton (in)famously recommending carrots be boiled for anything up to two and a quarter hours (!) and sprouts for fully 15 minutes and then, "when they are dished, stir in about 1-1/2 oz. of butter and a seasoning of a little pepper and some salt", so not even a pinch of nutmeg on the sprouts nor even a little bit of cumin to perk up the carrot mush.

Re the boiled food, I meant the majority of people who could not read a recipe book if they had one to hand.= of course the wealthy would garner in all the rare ones. What do you reckon cubob is? As for asfoetida. I like what happens to it in cooking but the stink of it can pervade a house..... the clue is in the name 
 I would be interested in your thoughts on cardamom - I think those tiny seeds have an incredible flavour and am surprised that it is not used much in the west...... I like cardamom coffee/tea..... and I had a cat that threw caution to the wind and became like a bandit to get at the gulab jamon sweetmeats that had it in the making  as well as rose water. I do not like cinnamon much .... seemed to be the only spice used in USA but i'd rather throw clove, nutmeg and coriander  powder about with relish.... HINT = a fillit of meat covered with crushed coriander seeds then wrapped in foil to roast, left to cool and served  cold sliced is a real treat.

PS Am I getting boring - I can't compete with  astonishment about LIRS' reusable teabag - and decaffed too. More staid in my ways and wondering how on earth to use the fengreek I just found on a shelf.

Priscilla wrote:

Re the boiled food, I meant the majority of people who could not read a recipe book if they had one to hand.

It seems that what happened to British cooking was an extreme case of the gastronomic revolution which took place in Europe around the time of the Industrial Revolution. The French cook Antonin Carême (1783-1833) is often pointed to as someone who promoted the re-sensitising of the Western palate at that time. He eschewed spices (with the exception of pepper) in favour of herbs. The rejection of the previously highly spiced European cooking in favour of a simpler cuisine is attributed to him. It’s sometimes said that the widespread habit of keeping ‘salt & pepper’ on dining tables is down to Carême. That said – when I was in Budapest a few years ago, restaurant tables would have on them cellars of salt and paprika (rather than pepper) – but that could be the exception which proves the rule. Carême, however, was probably just reflecting a wider cultural change which was going on around him.

Even today the French culinary establishment is the most resistant in Europe to the use of exotic spices and especially to chillies. This is understandable when one thinks about it. The refinement of French cuisine - le raffinement culinaire - has been built up for over 200 years based precisely on that premise. Intriguingly, the use of onions and garlic plays a central role in French cuisine whereas in the British variant even garlic was banished from kitchens around the time of the Industrial Revolution only to slowly make a re-appearance from the 1950s onwards.

Not everyone can eat coriander - it causes allergies for some people. My daughter-in-law can't have it, so we have to be a bit careful about what we put it into. Fenugreek I just pop into casseroles when I feel like it. I just made a casserole for dinner (with the help of my carer - I don't have the strength in my right arm to be certain not to burn myself or drop the dish) and I put a few spices in it, including fenugreek and coriander. Never quite sure how to use sumac.

Thanks, Caro, I'll try   fenugreek in some of the casserole put in a different dish as I have no idea what it will do to it. Looking on line I see I am not shopping at posh places enough and that cardamon coffee is available...... also how to make it is shown on line. Tarragon i s the new 'in' herb - mentioned in Gardeners World again.

MM will Know = bay leaves. I use dried but is fresh use better? (I know it was in Delphi,of course!)

Meles meles wrote:

And of course in the middle ages most of these new spices were just additions to the existing repertoire of long-established European flavourings, such as mustard, nigella, dill, fennel, rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, saffron, coriander, rue, sorrel, lemon-balm, horse-radish and wormwood etc..

The definitions of, and the differences between, herbs and spices were the subject of interesting debate on the Spice of Life thread.
 
In retail, jars of spices and dried herbs tend to use a colour code of green or brown labels for herbs and red or orange labels for spices. Peppercorns, as the uncrowned king of spices, get their own black label. It’s certainly the case that not only most spices but many if not most herbs also followed garlic out of British kitchens for the best part of 150 years from the late Georgian era onwards. The reasons for this are complex. Separate from any conscious attempt at re-sensitising tastebuds, it's believed that it was the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying rapid urbanisation of much of the population which was one reasons causing a decline in British cuisine generally. This saw large numbers of young people leaving the family home and moving away to the towns and cities. Consequently, there was an arrest in the handing down of skills, tips and recipes from one generation to another and many of the new industrial workers would live their lives almost like perpetual students. It's no coincidence that the advent of tinned and canned foods and other so-called 'convenience' foods such as cheap jam came quick on the heels of industrialisation. This was further exacerbated by the Poor Law and workhouse system in the 19th century and the general privations of the world wars and rationing in the first half of the 20th.