Stobart - Herbs, Spices and Flavourings

HERBS, SPICES
& FLAVOURINGS

Published by

Grub Street

4 Rainham Close

London SW11 6SS

Email: food@grubstreet.co.uk

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First published by

The International Wine and Food Publishing Company 1970

Copyright this edition

Grub Street 2017

Text Copyright

The International Wine and Food Society 2017

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-910690-49-9

eISBN: 978-1-911621-57-7

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-911621-57-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Design by Daniele Roa

I should like to express my thanks to the following for the help they have given me during the writing of this book:

Mrs Khayat, Mrs Eve French and Mr David E. Provan of Beirut, Lebanon; Mr A. C. Thimiah of Coorg and other friends and planters in India; Messrs Volkart in Tellicherry; Mrs C. Baptista of Bombay; the Ministry of Agriculture and other friends in New Delhi; Mr C. Kondoyiannis, agriculturalist to the Greek Embassy in London; Mr W. B. Boast and the scientists at the British Sugar Corporation; Grey Poupon, Amora and the Fdration des industries condimentaires de France; Mr D. J. Oliver and the scientific staff of Reckitt Colman Ltd, Norwich, England; Mr Lea of Lea and Perrins Ltd, Worcester, England; Frau Sthli and other friends at the Swiss Cheese Union in Bern; Chef Roy of the Htel du Nord, Dijon; Dr W. T. Stearn of the British Museum (Natural History), London; Professor V. H. Heywood, Dr J. McNeill, Dr J. B. Harborne and Miss Fiona Getliffe of the Hartley Botanical Laboratories, Liverpool University; Miss P. M. North of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain; Mr Tony Pueyo of Tarragona, Spain; E. & A. Evetts of Ashfields Herb Nursery, Market Drayton, Shropshire; Mr and Mrs Nils Hogner, Litchfield, Connecticut; and the many other friends and people whose names I never knew in many countries of Europe, Africa and Asia. Also, I should like to mention the authors of the dozens of books I have consulted on one point or another.

Since I have not agreed with everyone whom I have consulted, I alone must take the responsibility for anything I have said and especially for any over-simplifications I may appear guilty of in the eyes of scientific specialists.

I once helped to dig up two earthenware jars still containing the remains of food some four thousand years old. I was the guest of an Italian cave exploration group in the Sardinian mountains and the jars had been found by scratching under a crust of stalagmite in a corner of one of the caverns. The place was deep inside the mountain, damp as a tomb and with the rocks covered in a film of slimy mud. It was hard to believe that anyone had lived here because they liked it. Perhaps it had been only a refuge for times of danger and the food an emergency store. Perhaps the owner had been killed and this was why he had not returned for the jars he had hidden there.

Over the centuries the contents of the jars had degenerated into an unrecognizable brown powder, though the laboratories in Milan might just be able to say what it once had been. One could not taste it, but could only speculate on what exactly people living so long ago had enjoyed eating, and what their food had tasted like.

However, speculations do not last long when one is cold and wet. It was November, and the mountains outside were thick in mist and dark. It was well past dinner time, and ahead lay the cold scramble down the screes and the cheerless drive in wet clothes back to a hotel from which the kitchen staff would have long since departed for bed.

But this was Sardinia. Just outside the cave, on a limestone ledge overhanging the river which emerged from the rock like the Styx, there blazed a huge aromatic fire of rosemary and flex branches. Beside it, on wooden spits, sizzled two whole lambs tended by an old shepherd in white pants and a Garibaldi hat. The local refrigerator salesman, a jolly fellow, fat but energetic for all that, had come up after work with several other friends to see that we were properly looked after. He had himself carried an enormous flagon of wine up the steep slope and appeared already to have got quite a lot of it inside him. His rich Italian voice was blasting Verdi into the darkness around the flickering perimeter of firelight as he cut up a huge loaf and an almost equally large sheeps milk cheese with his sheath knife.

We ate with our hands, rolling up our sleeves to let the fat drip down our bare forearms. The lamb tasted of the rosemary smoke, the bread of brick ovens; the wine was rough but good. There were salty black olives plump with oil, and the cheese tasted of sheep. The firelight glowed on the happy faces: it was quite as wonderful as any banquet with cut glass glittering under the candelabra.

This is, generally, the kind of rough gastronomic experience on which this book is based. Although sometimes I have drunk great wines and eaten the most sophisticated food, more often I have dined in peasant houses, in the desert or on such Sardinian mountainsides. However, as it is peasant cooking which makes the greatest use of herbs and spices, perhaps this has been an advantage after all.

When the feast was over, as I reclined Roman fashion on a rock and watched the steam rise from my wet trousers, I could not help wondering if the people who had hidden those food jars four thousand years ago had not also eaten their meals in just this fashion. And their food, too, must have tasted of rosemary: they could scarcely have avoided it.

Nobody knows when man first started cooking or indeed how without lighters or matches, fires, at first sight, do not seem all that easy to make. Yet often in the Himalayas, surrounded by dripping pines and rhododendron bushes, when everything was soaked and I was the mug trying vainly to make a fire with paper and matches, I have watched with amazement the ease with which the hillmen take a piece of flint and steel, together with a small bag of dried moss tinder and, sheltering under the homespun blanket, their only clothing, in a moment strike and catch a spark in the moss and blow up the makings of a fire in their cupped hands. And what did they do before the age of flint and steel? I guess they also had their methods.

As to the first use of flavourings, again something that happened before recorded history and probably before cooking on fire, it is tempting to think that a man of more than average intelligence at some time tried tasting plants, gradually eating more of the ones he liked until he made sure they were not poisonous. But it is more likely that the idea of flavouring arose less purposefully than that. After all, any dumb beast will select by instinct the plants it likes and which are good for it. This we say is by instinct but it had nevertheless to be learned. When man first learned to cook he must have already been eating herbs. Even carnivorous animals sometimes eat herbs: a dog eats grass. We accept evolution, we can hardly not, but the implications are rarely thought out in concrete terms. Considered personally, for instance, it means that you can boast an unbroken chain of successful ancestors right back to primeval blobs. You would stamp on them today. It means that out of the millions of baby fishes which failed to make the grade because they were snapped up by something bigger or stranded in a pool, your ancestors were always, in every generation, the lucky and successful ones who got away and survived at least long enough to produce your multi-great-grandparents. They were also the ones who avoided the poisonous plants. In all the millions not one missed the mating. And what a remarkable thought, that if one could travel back in time through a sufficient number of great-grandmothers each with the intimate physical relationship which exists between parent and child there would have been strange little creature grandparents, the like of which we have never seen, laying eggs and eating herbs and why not the herbs they liked the taste of?