Constructing your personal Spice Chest

In the mundane, twentieth-century world, it is to a large degree the combination of typical spices, herbs, and other flavourings which give each ethnic cuisine its distinctive taste. Chinese food, Indian food, Italian food, and Mexican food each have unique combinations which tell the consumer their origins. And just as this is so today, so it was in the past.

So part of the process of developing your distinctive persona will include building your own personal "spice chest" of seasonings available and combinations utilized which is appropriate to the place, time, and class of your persona. This would allow you to reconstruct the authentic "taste of the time" which belongs to you.

Some factors to keep in mind:-

Time: it can be determined when various spices and herbs first became available in certain areas, so it is possible to eliminate certain flavours. For example, grains of paradise were first imported from West Africa into the Mediterranean area in the mid-12th century, so any persona earlier than that would not use them (unless you have a persona from West Africa--which might be fun, mind you, since the great empire of Ghana was reputed to be among the richest countries in the world).
Place: obviously, the location determines what herbs are local to the area, and what imported herbs may be grown there. Scandinavian are unlikely to use rosemary or bay leaves, since these need a Mediterranean climate to thrive, but they will use mustard seed and onions, which will stand their climate. Each region has its local herbs--Arabs use coriander leaf ("cilantro"), Europeans use parsley.
Class: it requires little reflection to realize that the flavouring of your food depends on your purse. Rich people use costly imported spices; poor people use garden herbs and alliums. Often cookbooks even give alternate recipes for flavouring dishes depending on the class of the eater: for example, John Russell’s Boke of Nurture (English, early 15th century), calls for ginger, cinnamon, grains of paradise, sugar, and turnesole in its hypocras recipe for lords, but substitutes ginger, canelle, long pepper, and clarified honey as good enough for the common people.

Sources of information:-

Sources of information start with cookbooks, if your persona comes from a time and place which produced cookbooks (after ancient Rome, there is a gap of nearly 1000 years in Europe until cookbooks started appearing again in the 13th century, and they are sparse for some time after). These are perhaps the most readily applicable sources, but you do need to keep a few things in mind. Cookbooks generally represent the food of the rich, so think of your class. They may also represent the exotic: the cooks may not have felt it necessary to write down the ordinary and commonplace (does your nice gourmet cookbook tell you how to boil potatoes or fry eggs?) Therefore they may tend to ignore the cheap and local components of the diet in favour of the imported and expensive.
Another source of valuable information is medical texts, since in medieval times diet was seen as an important regulator of health. Medical texts will often include lists of herbs and spices, along with their reputed effects on the consumer (e.g. heating or cooling, moist or dry). But you need to exercise caution, as the texts are likely to include things used only as medicinal drugs, not as food flavourings.
To find out the actual usage and proportion of spices, account books are very useful, since they tell how much was actually bought for use. Various account books have been published, and there are some collections, such as Thorold Rogers' History of Prices in England or a similar collection for Valencia. The warning here is that only imported goods would normally need to be bought. Most households would grow their own herbs, onions, etc., and so these would not appear on the account books.
Literature of your time and place can be helpful, since food tends to appear quite frequently in most literatures.

Return to Spice Chests.

Return to Home Page.