All Manner of Powders

Last Tuesday I posted a link on Facebook to Yonnie Travis' interpretation of Eyron en Poche (poached eggs in a sweet sauce), and one of the commenters asked about "Blawnche pouder" (i.e. "white powder"). Here's the original source of the recipe in question for context (emphasis added):

Cj - Eyron en poche. Take Eyroun, breke hem, an sethe hem in hot Water; than take hem Vppe as hole as thou may; than take flowre, an melle with Mylke, and caste ther-to Sugre or Hony, and a lytel pouder Gyngere, an boyle alle y-fere, and coloure with Safroun; an ley thin Eyroun in dysshys, and caste the Sewe a-boue, and caste on pouder y-now. Blawnche pouder ys best.  [Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)]

 So just what the heck is this stuff supposed to be? Sugar? Flour? Cocaine?

Medieval Italian cocaine dealer ... ok, it's really a sugar merchant.Theatrum sanitatis, codice 4182 della R. Biblioteca Casanatense. Rome

In the glossary of Curye on Inglysch, Hieatt and Butler offer the following:

Blawnce Pouder - ginger ground with sugar; see also powdour douce

That seems a bit odd considering the recipe above already listed sugar and ginger separately before calling for blawnche pouder. I suspect their conclusion was based on recipes like the following (again, emphasis added):

.Cxxx. Peerus in confyt. Take perus & pare hem clene. take gode rede wyne & mulberyes. other saundres & seeth the peres ther inne. & whan they buth y sode take hem up. make a syryp of wyne creke other vernage with blaunche poudour. other whyte sugur & poudour of ginger. & do the peres ther inne. seeth hit a litul and messe hit forth.  [Fourme of Curye / Rylands MS 7 (England, 1390)]

In modern English that phrase would be "with white powder, or white sugar and powdered ginger". While the "or" there certainly could mean "or in other words", but it could also mean "or if you don't have any".  That's really not as helpful as I'd like it to be.

The problem with that definition is compounded by recipes like ...

Warduns in syruppe. Take wardens (pears), and pare hom clene, and scthe hom in red wyn with mulberryes, or saunders, tyl thai byn tendur, and then take hom up, and cut hom, and do hom in a pot; and do therto wyn crete, or vernage ||, or other gode swete -wyne, and blaunch pouder, and sugur, and pouder of gynger, and let hom boyle awhile, and then serve hit forth.  [Ancient Cookery / Arundel 334](England, 1425)]

While this recipe is related to the one for "Peerus in confyt" from Fourme of Curye, it seems to be calling for sugar and ginger in addition to the blaunch pouder.

Then I found this recipe:

l - A potage on fysshday. Take an Make a styf Poshote of Milke an Ale; than take and draw the croddys thorw a straynoure wyth whyte Swete Wyne, or ellys Rochelle Wyne, and make it sum-what rennyng an sum-what stondyng, and put Sugre a gode quantyte ther-to, or hony, but nowt to moche; than hete it a lytil, and serue it forth al a-brode in the dysshys; an straw on Canel, and Gyngere, and ȝif thou haue Blank powder, straw on and kepe it as whyte as yt may be, and than serue forth.  [Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)]

... so it's already calling for sugar and ginger, and goes on to say "if you have blanche pouder". That kind of does it in for blawnche pouder being a mix of sugar and ginger. They already know you have both of those, so they wouldn't ask if you had them mixed, right?

At times like this I look and see what the French are up to (the words "blawnche pouder" are, after all, originally French, so why not?  In the glossary of his translation of The Viandier of Taillevent, Terence Scully cites the following entry from Cotgrave's 1611 French-English dictionary (silly, I should have thought to look there first):

Pouldre blanche - A powder compounded of Ginger, Cinnamon, and Nutmegs; much in use among Cookes.

Of course Cotgrave's was written over 150 years after the recipe from TFCCB that started this mess (the one way at the top of the page), so it's possible that the meaning had changed significantly by then ... or was just plain wrong.  It's also worth noting that Nutmeg doesn't really show up much in English cookbooks before the 1600s.

On a side note, Cotgrave's has a recipe for Powder Douce that doesn't quite mesh with the source recipes we have from the fifteenth century.

Pouldre de duc - A powder made of Sugar and Cinnamon, & having (sometimes) other Aromaticall simples added unto them.

So let's get back to what we know (or at least what we're pretty sure of).  Blawnche pouder is probably a mixture of sugar and other spices, possibly including ginger.

Also ... nope, that's pretty much it.

We can guess that the mix is light-colored. After all, the English translation of "blawnche pouder" is "white powder", so it wouldn't make much sense for the stuff to be dark brown or red. Of course annual "white sales" in the US include merchandise in all sorts of colors now (but originally included only white bed linens).

This is one of those situations where I will freely admit I just don't know for sure.  Until someone locates an actual recipe for blawnche pouder, I think I'll go with the sugar & ginger mix. Since it's often sprinkled on top of an otherwise finished dish, perhaps use powdered sugar? That would fit the description and keep it distinct from powder douce.

Oh Saffron, My Saffron

As many of my friends can tell you, I really like saffron. I go through more of the stuff in a month than most Americans use in their entire lives.

If I were a medieval king, all my land would be used to grow saffron

Given that you're reading this blog, you probably can guess that I really like medieval European cuisine as well, and one of the more commonly used spices in the Middle Ages (at least for the wealthy) was saffron. In spite of it being the most expensive spice, it appears in 39% of the recipes in Forme of Cury (England, 1390) and 41% of the recipes in Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430).

Of course when people are selling stuff that's expensive, some of it is going to turn out to be fake. This isn't just a modern problem. There are plenty of records of medieval trials and punishments for product adulteration. There are jerks in this world, and there always have been.

It turns out that some of the saffron I got a while back - stuff that seemed like a really great deal - isn't actually saffron. I don't have the money to find out what it actually is, but I thought it would be worthwhile to put up a brief guide on how to tell the real stuff from the fake.

The Threads

Saffron threads are the stigmas of the flower of Crocus sativus. They tend to be 25 to 30 mm in length, but can be much shorter because they get brittle and break easily when dry.

A pinch of saffron threads

In the above picture, note how the threads tend to be thicker at one end than the other, and the change in thickness is gradual. The color of the can also change, usually from dark red at the thick end to yellow at the tip.

A pinch of ... something else

Here the threads are strangely long, some up to 50mm. While there are some that look like they have thicker portions, closer examination shows them to be multiple strands twisted together. None of the threads change in thickness. There is a mix of colors, but each thread in itself is uniform of color.

A few saffron threads in water

When whole saffron threads are dropped into warm water, color starts to steep out immediately, though it can take a while.

Ugly, long strings of stuff in water

The fake stuff may also discolor the water, depending on what was used to make it look like saffron. Note that even though I've added about five times as much of the fake stuff as I did the real stuff in the previous photo, the fake stuff produces about the same amount of color.

Typically when I cook with saffron, I grind it up with a bit of salt using a small mortar and pestle. This helps the color and flavor diffuse more quickly into the food.

Saffron ground with salt

Note how small the particles of saffron are after it's ground, and how the salt takes on an orange-red color.

Foul, nasty strings of stuff kind of ground with salt

The fake threads however do not grind up easily. It is rather interesting to note some tiny yellow flecks and the yellowish tint to the salt. I suspect that there may actually be some low-grade (yellow) saffron or some other yellow plant material mixed in with the evil fake threads.

Yummy, saffron-infused water

Here I dumped the saffron-salt mixture into warm water and the color suffused through it immediately.

Bad, wicked, evil, naughty stuff in water

The fake threads ground with salt and dumped into water don't quite have the same effect. Many of them seem pretty much inert. Normally when I cook rice with a good pinch of saffron, the rice comes out a bright yellow color, but the one time I did that with the fake stuff the rice turned out beige and flavorless.

Another sign of bogus saffron is the scent. I love the fragrance of the real stuff, but the fake threads smell ... well, off. That's a hard thing to put on a web page though.

Thinking about "THINKING ABOUT FOOD IN FANTASY"

I was at a writer's retreat this weekend when one of my friends posted a link on Facebook for an article for writers about food in fantasy. I happily clicked through, expecting to see a nice bit of writing that would dispel the common myths about medieval European cooking - after all, there's so much more information available now, and all the old bunk about the middle-ages was debunked a decade ago, right?

Sadly, it was not to be. As the other writers around me can attest, I made all sorts of noises as I read the article, including gasps of disbelief and strangled cries of mental anguish. It was ok through the first five paragraphs, but after that it completely went off the rails.

So, of course, I am compelled to post a rebuttal. Are you surprised? I didn't think so.

Sugar

Some of what the article says about sugar (the origins, the early use of other sweeteners-primarily honey, etc.) is essentially correct. But it implies that sugar in Europe was incredibly rare and expensive.

"Sugar was still a luxury in Europe and America until the 18th century, when demand led to the creation of sugar plantations in the New World, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and India, using slave and indentured labour."

"In a fantasy world similar to our Europe at any time up to the 18th century, sugar would most likely be a rare and expensive commodity." 

Based upon the prices in 15th century London (Prof. John H. Munro, University of Toronto), a craftsman's daily wages could buy a half pound of sugar. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's also a half pound of freakin' sugar for a single day, which is about double the current level of US sugar consumption per capita.

This is not to say that they were eating that much sugar back then, but rather that (for the growing middle class and nobility) there was plenty of sugar to be had. If the characters in your fantasy world are poor then they'd probably have stuff sweetened with honey, otherwise they can probably get sugar.

Meat

The article clearly suggests that meat consumption was not what it is today.

"Without the large scale farming and production that we know today, meat would be less common and much more expensive."

The main reason that modern society requires modern levels of meat production is that we have a very small percentage of our population that actually produces food. Everyone else builds stuff, moves stuff, or pushes paper (or data) around. The few "farmers" we have must do a lot more work to feed everyone.

Yes, medieval agriculture did produce less meat, but they also had way fewer mouths to feed.

There have been a bunch of recent studies which tested the levels of carbon, nitrogen, and iodine in medieval skeletal remains to determine the relative consumption of meat, plants, and fish. They've all shown that medieval meat consumption wasn't out of line with that of the modern diet.

What's more, one study compared the level of meat consumption between the poor and the wealthy and concluded, "No convincing case for social variation in diet can nevertheless be made by comparing isotopic with archaeological and anthropological data."

It's also worth noting that documents from medieval prisons show that prisoners were fed up to two pounds of meat per week. If meat were as scarce as the article suggests then I expect there would have been long lines of people waiting to get thrown in jail.

One final criticism on the topic, the article says:

"Even if a poor family lives next to a wood full of game, they may not necessarily be able to hunt there."

This is technically true, but the poor family could easily raise chickens and pigs for their own consumption or to sell ... and they usually did.

Fruits and Vegetables

The article goes on to discuss the consumption levels of other foodstuffs, and starts off with a statement that is, at best, wildly inaccurate.

"Vegetables are probably going to make up the main bulk of a fantasy character’s diet in any period or setting, unless the character is very rich."

As shown in the section above, the poor got plenty of meat. Further, a huge amount of the daily caloric intake for all classes took the form of bread. The poor got bread from a mixed variety of grains (sometimes called "maslin bread") and the wealthy got fine, white bread (called "manchets" or "paindemain"). Workers in England's manoral system received one or two meals a day as part of their pay, and those meals were often documented to include a full pound of bread per person.

Yes, they ate lots of fruits and vegetables. Whatever was in season was going to be eaten (or preserved if possible), however they were not "the main bulk", regardless of social class. Further, there is plenty of documentation that shows the medieval nobility often had the same health issues related to a crappy diet that we have now: diabetes, obesity, and gout. So some of them (like some of us) didn't eat enough fruits and veggies.

Then there's this little snippet:

"Potatoes, conversely, are notorious for growing almost anywhere."

I think that sentence made me gag a few times.  Yes, potatoes grow everywhere ... except for anywhere outside of the Americas before the year 1500. Potatoes are a new-world plant. They didn't have them in medieval Europe. So, just ... no.

Spices

Go ahead and look at Professor Monroe's page again. Spices were expensive in medieval Europe, but they weren't that expensive. Meat pies sold to the working class in the local market would likely have some spice (probably cinnamon). Saffron, which currently is and always has been the most expensive spice in the world, is included in about half of the recipes in medieval cookbooks. Yes, those books were meant for nobles and the middle class, but they were still consuming an incredible amount of spices each year.

From rough calculations, I've figured that spices were about ten times as expensive then as they are now (based on "minimum wage"). That's pretty pricey, but not out of reach ... even for the working class.

Water

The paragraph on water is just plain wrong. Medieval Europeans drank plenty of water, and most of it was perfectly safe. The alcohol content in medieval wine and ale wasn't high enough to kill off parasites. Wells back then weren't any more polluted than they are now.

Conclusion

It can be very useful for writers to consider food for their settings, and adding food references to stories or games set in a medieval fantasy world can add a great amount of realism. Just be sure to get your information from a reliable source.

How Much is Too Much?

Sometimes people say things that make me twitch, the most common one being the old canard that medieval cooks used spices to cover up the taste of spoiled meat (hint: they didn't).

The thing that sent me into fits today though was a bit I read in an article on the NPR website entitled How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking. You ready? Here it is:

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them.

That doesn't sound unreasonable, does it? They even linked to the website of Professor John Munro (Department of Economics, University of Toronto), which is a site I've often used and cited myself.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

See, the thing is that if you actually look at the numbers Professor Munro provides, you find that they don't make such a clear case for "really expensive", and they certainly don't show spices to have been completely out of reach for the working and middle classes.

Near the bottom of Munro's website is a bunch of tables where he lists the actual prices of a number of goods, and includes the quantity that could be bought by the daily wage of a carpenter or mason. Cinnamon, for example was 24 pence/pound in 1439 London, and the day's wages for a carpenter (8d) could buy about a third of a pound.

Yeah, that's a lot. If you go by the daily wage of an unskilled worker instead (2d) and assume that's the equivalent to today's minimum wage, it works out to about ten times what spices cost in the local grocery store.

Here's the thing: that's for a third of a frickken' pound of cinnamon. Most people don't use that much cinnamon in their entire life.

They could, however, go down to the local spice seller and buy a small amount of cinnamon, say a quarter of an ounce, and it wouldn't bust their budget for the month.

Now take into account that, like today, many in medieval Europe's working class relied on fast food -pies, sausages, and stews from the local cookshops. In order to attract more customers, the owners of the cookshops are going to do their best to make the food taste good. That means sometimes adding ... wait for it ... spices. So even the poorest folks in London likely had a little spice in their lives.

The article goes on to quote some other theories about late medieval and early modern diet, and most of them are even further off the mark than the whole spice thing. I can go into details if you really want, but I should probably take anti-seizure medicine first.

In summary: Yes, spices were expensive, but they weren't that expensive.

... and no, you couldn't really buy a horse with a single peppercorn.

The Quiz - Question 2

A couple of weeks back I posted a 6 question quiz about medieval cooking. I had tried to phrase the questions so that there would be many possible answers that could be considered to be correct depending on viewpoint. Here are my thoughts on the second question.

2. Why did medieval Europeans use a lot of spices in their cooking?

The answer to this question really depends on how the phrase "a lot of spices" is interpreted. It could be understood to mean "a large quantity of spice per dish", implying that the prepared food had a strong flavor of spices. Alternately, it could be read as "a wide variety of spices", which could be meant to imply that each dish included many spices.

The first meaning - "a large quantity of spice" - usually appears in connection with the mistaken belief that medieval cooks used spices to cover the flavor of spoiled meat. I've discussed this myth and its possible origins elsewhere, so I won't go into it here. Suffice to say, if you want to see my head explode, tell someone it's a fact where I can overhear.

Did medieval cooks use large quantities of spices? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The only recipes we have come from the cookbooks of the wealthy, and almost all of those recipes completely lack measured amounts for ingredients, so there is really no way to know if they put in a lot or a little of any given spice. What's more, even if we did have measurements to work with, what would we use as a comparison? To some people anything more than a pinch of salt is too much. To others anything less than drowning in curry is too little.

Assuming they did use large quantities of spices, one possible reason for doing so presents itself: conspicuous consumption. Serving guests a meal obviously made with great amounts of expensive, imported spices shows the host to be wealthy and therefore influential. There is some evidence to support this in medieval accounts of banquets. Still, I sincerely doubt a host would be successful if he gave a banquet where the guests were served unpalatably spiced food, regardless of how expensive it was.

The second meaning - "a wide variety of spices" - is a bit easier to examine. The list of spices used in medieval European cuisine is surprisingly large and diverse, and a given dish may contain a half-dozen different spices or more. However, this doesn't seem very different from many cuisines around the world (e.g. Indian, Mediterranean, Chinese).

If we take the viewpoint that their use of multiple spices in a dish is exceptional, then is there any possible reason for doing so?

Again, conspicuous consumption is a possibility. A mix of spices though can be harder to identify, and it can still be overdone. If a cook has gone to the expense of putting in rare spices, it'd be a shame if no one wanted to eat the final product.

There has been some recent research that demonstrates how certain spices like cinnamon and cloves can inhibit microbial growth, but given the medieval beliefs about health and disease I doubt that this aspect had any bearing on medieval cuisine. Even medieval humoral theories don't seem to have substantially impacted how spices were used.

On the whole, I think the best answer that we can give for this question is: Because they liked the way it tasted.

Spice and Spoilage

I recently came across an article from the March issue of Cornell University's Cornell Chronicle titled Study: Antibacterial spices explain why some like it hot. It describes the recent research done by Professor Paul Sherman, and the paper he published in the March 1998 issue of the journal Quarterly Review of Biology.

According to Sherman, some commonly used spices have significant antibacterial properties and may help prevent illness caused by food-born pathogens. More specifically, in the interview he said, "We believe the ultimate reason for using spices is to kill food-borne bacteria and fungi." Obviously this subject is of interest to a medieval food historian - medieval food preservation and disease prevention are a couple of those perennial hot topics. While I won't deny Sherman's claims outright, I do approach the whole thing with a good amount of skepticism.

antibacterial?

My first question is on the degree of antibacterial properties of the 43 spices he's studied. At what concentrations were his tests performed? The article lists garlic and onion as being among the most potent germ killers, and states that "... they kill everything". I'm very sure I've had food go bad that contained both onions and garlic, and I know that mixing them in with raw beef won't make it safe to eat. This means that the concentration of the active ingredient is important, and this leads me to wonder if the amount of a given spice (say, cinnamon) needed to be an effective antibacterial agent would make the food inedible.

Sherman also draws a connection between latitude and spice consumption, with the inference that in warmer climates foods will spoil more quickly and therefore they need more spicing to prevent this spoilage. The article doesn't mention that the majority of spices (e.g. cinnamon, cloves, pepper, etc.) do not grow well outside of a tropical climate, meaning they'd need to be imported to the colder climates and would therefore be less likely to be used there. Did his study make any attempt to correct for this? If not, then it would seriously skew his data.

The article goes on to state that people "... probably aren't eating spices for their nutritive value, the biologist said, because the same macronutrients are available in similar amounts in common vegetables, which are eaten in much greater quantities." I know of one specific case that contradicts this: capsicum consumption in Mexico. The traditional Mexican diet would be severely deficient in vitamin C if it weren't for the consumption of capsicum peppers.

On the plus side, at one point in the article Sherman notes that the idea of using spice to cover the taste of spoiled food is bogus. He says that such a practice "... ignores the health dangers of ingesting spoiled food."

I'll have to see if I can get a copy of the original paper.

UPDATE: I've found one link that gives more detail on the paper, and it appears that some of my questions were addressed. I've also found a couple interesting links that discuss the antibacterial properties of some spices (see the links below).

Darwinian gastronomy: Why we use spices
Antimicrobial Effects of Spice Extracts on Three Species of Bacteria
CINNAMON IS LETHAL WEAPON AGAINST E. COLI O157:H7

Thoughts on Pepper

The other night I was cooking dinner, and as I was seasoning whatever it was, a thought occurred to me. Why pepper? On just about every dinner table here in the US, on almost every restaurant table as well, are two spice containers: salt and pepper.

The salt I can understand. There's a biological need for salt, and since it was hard to come by in human pre-history, an innate desire for salt has developed. But what about the pepper? Pepper has no function in human biology, so there's no built-in drive to eat it. The only reason we put it on our food is for taste, and that's no different from any number of other spices. So why has pepper become more common than ginger or cinnamon or mint?

My first thought is that it might be a carry-over from earlier habits. Salt is one of the most commonly used spices in medieval cookbooks. Perhaps pepper was too, and since cooks sometimes do not put enough spice into a dish, maybe it became the practice to have the two most common spices set out on the table to allow the diner to suppliment a dish's flavor. As a quick check for this, I looked to see how often pepper shows up in medieval recipes.

I have some statistics from medieval cookbooks already compiled ... Unh. Not very conclusive. Below is a list of the four most common spices from various cookbooks.

Enseignements (France, 1300): Pepper - 50%, Ginger - 35%, Cinnamon - 28%, Mustard - 26%

Forme of Cury (England, 1390): Salt - 47%, Saffron - 39%, Ginger - 23%, Pepper - 14%,

Du fait de cuisine (France, 1420): Salt - 81%, Ginger - 70%, Grains of Paradise - 62%, Pepper - 41%

Liber cure cocorum (England, 1430): Saffron - 34%, Salt - 31%, Pepper - 27%, Ginger - 20%

Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books (England, 1450): Salt - 56%, Ginger - 42%, Saffron - 41%, Pepper - 31%

A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye (England, 1550): Salt - 36%, Cinnamon - 30%, Ginger - 22%, Mace - 18%

The Good Housewife's Jewell (England, 1596): Ginger - 40%, Pepper - 40%, Salt - 40%, Cinnamon - 35%

At a glance, we can probably leave out the grains of paradise and the mace - they both only make the top four of a single book. Salt makes the top four of 6 books, and is the number 1 spot for 3 of them. Pepper also shows up in 6, but is the top spot for only 1. Ginger is in the top four of all 7 books, and is in the top spot for 1. Also, ginger ranks higer than pepper for 5 of the books. Why don't we have a ginger shaker on the table then?

It looks like I need to do more digging ...