Lesson 1: An Herbal and Spice Primer
This lesson will define herbs and spices. We’ll learn how to buy them, store them, prep them, and learn some general rules of thumb about cooking.
Let me introduce the references we will use for this course. The primary book, Cooking With Herbs and Spices by Milo Miloradovich, is a small paperback written in 1950 and republished in 1989. Miloradovich was a first generation American and draws heavily on his Eastern European background where herbs and spices are frequently used to heighten culinary appeal. This book exclusively deals with culinary uses. A significant reference book is Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs, which is comprehensive and detailed on specific plants. It has a section on Uses, History, and Cultivation for each specific herb, as well as general essays. Other books are suggested, specifically Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here For the Food, Charlie Trotter’s Gourmet Cooking For Dummies, and Dornenburg and Pages’s Culinary Artistry. We’ll highlight uses for these books where appropriate.
Definition & a Touch of History
For culinary purposes, an herb is defined as the leaf and tender stem of a plant used as a flavoring agent in food, i.e. the herbaceous part of the plant. Spices, by contrast, are the dried parts of a plant, i.e. the seeds, roots, bark, flowers, fruits and rhizomes that also are used as a flavoring agent in food,(rhizomes are an underground, horizontal stem such as ginger). Herbs can be used in either a fresh or dried state; spices are almost always dried.
Pronunciation of the word, “herb”, incidentally, is not standard. Originally, no English speaker pronounced the “h” in herb, but now only Americans keep it silent. Besides pronunciation differences, there are also definitional differences between America and Europe. This is a result of the significant role herbs and spices played in European and Asian history.
The history of herbs is mostly medicinal, although the use of herbs in food is mentioned in 1550 BC in an Egyptian source. The culinary history for spices is more complicated due to the development of the “spice trade”. Spices were not only prized for their culinary aspects, but also for their monetary or barter value. Pepper, the most historically valuable spice, was actually used as currency. The word “spice” which is related to “species”, originally meant merchandise, especially imported Asian products.
A reason for spices’ value as a trade commodity was the costly distance between the suppliers (Asia) and the market, (first the Mideast, then Europe). However, compared to other goods traded between the two regions, spices took up less cargo space, so their popularity was higher than bulkier products.
The resultant spice trade is an integral part of the history of the rising and falling empires of India, China, Italian city states like Venice, Holland, England, and Portugal. The trade was anything but polite - piracy and ruthlessness are key descriptors. Indeed, many current practices of modern international capitalism, both good and bad, were developed by the great (and unregulated) international spice trading companies like England’s East India Company and Holland’s Dutch East Indian Company.
Gradually, as shipping became less expensive and herbs and spices could be grown in newly found territories such as the Americas, their culinary value came to the fore. Today, the U.S., Germany, Japan, and France are the biggest importers of spices, with India, Indonesia, Brazil, and the Malaysia the biggest exporters.
