A Medieval Dutch Spice Mix (and a German Shopping List)

So far I haven’t put anything Dutch on the blog, but Indonesian commodities do certainly appear in medieval texts from the Low Countries, both in Middle Dutch and in Latin. A good example of the former is Ghent, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, 15 — a fifteenth-century Middle Dutch cookery book that includes a large number of recipes calling for spices grown and harvested in what is now the Republic of Indonesia. An edition of the work has been published by Braekman (1986), and several recipes from it can be found in a lovely volume on medieval and early modern Dutch natural science (Huizinga, Lie, and Veltman 2002).

The recipes in the manuscript make extensive use of Indonesian ingredients, including long pepper (Piper longum or P. retrofractum, the latter particularly commonly grown in Java), cloves (the dried flower of Syzygium aromaticum), nutmeg, and mace (both products of the same tree, Myristica fragrans). In one instance (B 2.69, line 3) mace — now called foelie in Dutch, from Latin folium (‘leaf’) — is referred to as ‘nutmeg flowers’ (muscatenbloemen), which was a common formula in medieval European texts (see the post on the Landshuter Hochzeit that I wrote a couple of months ago).

Fig. 1 — I’ll never stop being amazed by these distances. It’s about 12,500 kilometres from Ghent to the islands of eastern Indonesia where cloves, nutmeg, and mace were harvested in the Middle Ages.

The recipe I’ve translated below, numbered B 2.70 by Braekman, is for a general spice mix of a kind common in medieval European texts — compare the ‘sweet powder’ (poudre douce) in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century cookery books in English and French, for example. These mixes regularly included nutmeg, mace, and clove — all Indonesian spices. The gemeijn spijscruijt below is no exception.

TEXT

(1) Om gemeijn spijscruijt
Neemt VIII loot (1) peepers, ende VI loot gembers, ende twee loot kaneels,
ende naegel, muscaeten, te zamen I loot: dit stoot te samen.

TRANSLATION

‘For a general spice mix. Take eight loot (1) of pepper, and six loot of ginger, and two loot of cinnamon, and clove, nutmeg, one loot: throw it all together.’

NOTES

(1) 1 loot is approximately 14 grams. This was a common unit of measurement in medieval Europe and wasn’t restricted to Middle Dutch. A fun example can be seen in this short text, which appears to be a shopping list scribbled on the front pastedown of a southern German medical manuscript now in the Zentralbibliothek in Solothurn, Switzerland (Cod. S 386), dated to the 1460s (Figure 2):

muscart nuss muscart blůtt
zitwan negellin bärisskörnner kuböblūn
galgan kardamiemlun Jmber langen
pfeffer zimerrör a͠n j lott

Fig. 2 — The shopping list (if that’s what it is) transcribed above, from Solothurn, Zentralbibliothek, Cod. S 386.

‘… nutmeg, mace (‘nutmeg flower’), zedoary, cloves, barberries, cubebs, galangal, cardamoms, ginger, long pepper, cinnamon, each 1 lott [~14g].’

Some less exotic ingredients are listed above those, including fennel (venchell) and liquorice (siessheltz). I found this text by searching the wonderful Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland for herbals; it was one of the first items that came up, and the front pastedown was of course one of the first pages I saw. Serendipity — but also a reminder of how common references to Indonesian commodities really are in medieval European texts.

REFERENCES

Braekman, W. L. 1986. Een nieuw Zuidnederlands kookboek uit de vijftiende eeuw. Brussel: Scripta 17.

Huizinga, E.; Lie, O. S. H.; and Veltman, L. M. 2002. Een wereld van kennis. Hilversum: Verloren.

Thanks to the excellent Sjoerd Levelt (@SLevelt) for pointing me in the direction of the Middle Dutch texts.

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A. J. West, December 2019