Delectations

A LITTLE OF WHAT YOU FANCY

Cooking with spices was a necessity before modern food preservation methods started coming in, late in the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth. Spices were needed to cover up the often-moot taste of the food, due to questionable freshness. But they were also needed to pep up the monotonous diet of the times— and but for festive occasions, it was monotonous. This monotony was also true of the food of the immediate postwar period in Europe. I used to send food parcels to Germany and Italy, and the one thing people always asked for was pepper and other spices, but mostly, pepper. Black pepper has always been very precious. When Rome was sacked by the Goths in 408 A.D., King Alaric demanded, besides gold and silver, 3,000 pounds of pepper. And Genoa was set up as a commercial center in the Middle Ages when her people received more than 16,000 pounds of pepper as their share of the booty after one of the battles the Crusaders had won over the Moslems in the Holy Land. They sold it at a high price.

NH

About the Author

Nika Hazelton

A LITTLE OF WHAT YOU FANCY

Cooking with spices was a necessity before modern food preservation methods started coming in, late in the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth. Spices were needed to cover up the often-moot taste of the food, due to questionable freshness. But they were also needed to pep up the monotonous diet of the times— and but for festive occasions, it was monotonous. This monotony was also true of the food of the immediate postwar period in Europe. I used to send food parcels to Germany and Italy, and the one thing people always asked for was pepper and other spices, but mostly, pepper. Black pepper has always been very precious. When Rome was sacked by the Goths in 408 A.D., King Alaric demanded, besides gold and silver, 3,000 pounds of pepper. And Genoa was set up as a commercial center in the Middle Ages when her people received more than 16,000 pounds of pepper as their share of the booty after one of the battles the Crusaders had won over the Moslems in the Holy Land. They sold it at a high price.