Vera Cires Cires من عند Lylovshchina, Irkutskaya oblast', روسيا، 664536
Bitter, but very good.
This was an excellent book, both well-written and very informative. Although it's a scholarly book, I think it is quite accessible to the lay-person (it helps that the endnotes are at the back, which makes the reading experience smoother -- this would annoy me if I were reading it for scholarly purposes, though); my public library has a copy, which indicates the press is also marketing it widely. I didn't have any trouble, and I'm no expert on the Middle Ages. The book deals with several aspects of spices and the Middle Ages: Why and how were they used in foods and medicines? What did people know about their origins (both real and imagined)? What was it about spices that helped to prompt the great voyages of discovery? I think Freedman gives satisfactory and very interesting answers to all these questions, and I certainly learned a lot. I also learned about a number of spices I had never heard of before, which is always fun. Freeman makes enviably good use of primary texts, including cookbooks, account ledgers, and early maps, and I particularly enjoyed the little sidebars with extended quotations from some of the cookbooks. I don't think I'll be trying too many of the recipes, though. In addition to all this, Out of the East answered my long-time question about spices: why is cardamom used in Swedish baking and Indian cooking, but nowhere in between? The answer has to do with the fact that Medieval European cooking was much closer to today's Indian or Middle Eastern cooking than today's European food, and would have included many dishes with sauces heavy with a wide variety of spices. This type of cooking began to fall out of favor in Europe around the time of the Renaissance, with the rise of traditional French cooking, and spices were mostly relegated to desserts or holiday foods.