If I were a wealthy aristocrat in 1600's Europe what would I have used to season my food?

by Leecannon_
gothwalk

In terms of seasoning on the table, you'd have had salt, and very likely nothing else. It would have been in a small open dish, maybe with a separate cover, and would be served either with a tiny spoon, or more likely by taking a pinch of it between forefinger and thumb.

However, there were two other major ways in which the taste of food was changed: sauces on the table, and spices in the dishes themselves.

There were a number of different sauces, which were made up in advance and kept in jars, and then placed in saucers (hence the name) on the table or on a sideboard when a meal was served. It was considered essential that all sauces anyone might want were present, according to an ordinance of Thomas, Lord Fairfax 'for the prevention of Errands, lett all Sauses be ready at the Door, for even one Message of Mustard will take a Man's attendance from the Table'.

These sauces included the aforementioned mustards, of which there were many variations, green sauces (essentially finely chopped herbs in verjuice or vinegar, thickened with finely ground breadcrumbs), cameline sauces (again with the verjuice or vinegar, but this time with cinnamon, ginger and cloves as the main components), and some other variations. Beaten butter was another such table condiment, prepared by mixing a small amount of stock into melted butter and whisking it until it resembled a mayonnaise. In the larger household, sauces were made in a dedicated room called, unsurprisingly, a saucery.

For the spices in the food, we'd recognise most of them: cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and saffron, for example, as well as pepper, cardamom, coriander (most likely the seed, not the leaf), turmeric, cumin, caraway, and anise. Some would be less familiar, grains of paradise being foremost among those. It's a pepper-like spice, with a warm, almost rose-like scent. It's just now coming back into use, having been largely ignored for centuries in between. Galengal was in fairly steady use - we see it today in Thai cooking. Sugar was still treated like a spice as well. Chilis, allspice, and vanilla weren't much there, though - those were new world spices, and were only barely coming into use in the 1600s.

Spices were used a lot in food - they were a display of wealth as much as a culinary necessity, setting the food of the rich apart from the plainer food of the common people, who would have had salt and whatever herbs they could grow. In addition, they probably weren't as strong as the spices we have today, since they'd have spent more time in transit, and most of them do diminish in strength over time as oils evaporate. It wouldn't be until much later, with a much wider availability of spices, that plainer food became prestigious again.

Sources:

Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England

Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance