04-18-2015, 04:10 AM
Eleatic Guest wrote:
Don’t know much about the ancient spice routes except that pepper and other spices were brought over from India via Egypt and even at this time may have originated in the Spice Islands and South-East Asia, but I think it had medical uses earlier on. Doctors used pepper as it acted as an irritant which stimulated secretion in the intestines and aided digestion. The following link to this web page might be of assistance summarising the early pepper trade, although it lacks sources, being a cuisine page. In regards to milling it I suppose the boxwood one described might have been an exotic oddity brought over from India by a rich Roman but for the rest the old mortar and pestle would have sufficed.
http://www.peppertrail.com/inner.php?men...index_id=1
Quote:What kind of pepper that might have been? Hardly from the Indonesian spice islands. And in what way if any, could a pepper mill technically differ from the handmills for grain? We will hardly have to think of it as a burr mill, not?
Don’t know much about the ancient spice routes except that pepper and other spices were brought over from India via Egypt and even at this time may have originated in the Spice Islands and South-East Asia, but I think it had medical uses earlier on. Doctors used pepper as it acted as an irritant which stimulated secretion in the intestines and aided digestion. The following link to this web page might be of assistance summarising the early pepper trade, although it lacks sources, being a cuisine page. In regards to milling it I suppose the boxwood one described might have been an exotic oddity brought over from India by a rich Roman but for the rest the old mortar and pestle would have sufficed.
http://www.peppertrail.com/inner.php?men...index_id=1
Regards
Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr
"You can conquer an empire from the back of a horse but you can't rule it from one"
"You can conquer an empire from the back of a horse but you can't rule it from one"
