Good morning. Today is duodi, the 22nd of Messidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le cumin, a spice made from parsley.
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Salt is an obvious staple of table spice, but how did pepper get to be its constant companion? Aside from adding heat to a dish for a completely different (but complimentary) taste to salt, there are hundreds of other spices that could have been the number two. And indeed, in the thousands of years before peppercorn prices began to drop and new world chili peppers introduced another form of heat to the table, the cheapest and most common second table spice was cumin, which adds a warm heat instead of a ... well ... peppery one. The ready availability of cumin – which was cultivated in the near east and less subject to silk road volatility – gave it more mentions in the Bible than pepper, and more commonplace use in traditional recipes of the eastern Mediterranean shoreline as well.
The church was everything in medieval Europe. Much of European history after the turn of the first millennium can be explained by pointing out that the Roman Catholic church – rather than any nominal political entity – was the true successor to the Roman Empire, and that military leaders – kings and princes and dukes – were merely wealthy people with weapons whom the church left to do the dirty work of administering territory. The flip back to secular leadership being prime took 500 years, and only first started to rumble in the 12th century. In Scotland, there was no better harbinger of this rumble than one William Cumin.
