herb and spice use
herb and spice use
A metheglin in modern definition is any mead with herbs or spices added. For the purposes of looking at historical meads, this group includes about half of the recipes. Therefore breaking the category down further makes a lot of sense. A natural break is between meads made with herbs and those made with spices. A third category becomes those that contain both.
What is an herb, a spice? A spice by culinary definition is a seed, fruit, root, or bark used to color or flavor food. An herb is leaves, flowers or stems used for the same purpose. These categories have changed over time; and some cite an herb as leaves of non-woody plants only and spices as everything else.
When mead recipes are grouped purely by the culinary definition of their additions, the lists do not appear to match natural breaks in the groupings of flavors as they are added in the recipes.
When the spice group is defined with an eye to ingredients that were also historically imported as part of the spice trade, and by considering the additions that the recipes themselves designate as spices, the categories and the recipes match much better. Here the list of mead spices is much shorter than the culinary one: allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cubeb, galangal, ginger, grains of paradise, long pepper, mace, nutmeg, pepper, and saffron. Coriander is arguably included but on balance of evidence I place it with “herbs.”
Culinary spices that would have been locally grown in Europe, such as fennel seed, mustard seed and parsley root are pushed over into the herb category that then becomes herbs and locally-grown spices.Herbs are therefore most plant substances added to mead other than the very sort list of spices.
Spices are a wonderful flavor addition for mead. About half of the total historical mead recipes I have cataloged include spices (this includes recipes duplicated in multiple sources).About 1 in 4 (25%) of the recipes from before 1600 contain spices, whereas over half of the 17th century recipes contain them. This strongly suggests a shift in how mead was flavored over time.
Ginger, cloves, and cinnamon are the most prevalent spices, each appearing in over half of the recipes containing spices. Cinnamon is slightly more prevalent in earlier recipes, and cloves become slightly more popular in the 17th century. The type of cinnamon is not usually specified, but both cassia cinnamon and true cinnamon (Ceylon) are expected to be present.
In the middle range of popularity, appearing in 11-35% of spiced recipes are (in decreasing order of frequency): nutmeg, mace, pepper, and grains of paradise. Mace and grains of paradise are relatively more popular in the 17th century. Non-specific terminology leaves some uncertainty in differentiating between mace and nutmeg.
Galangale, saffron, and cardamom each appear in less than 10% of spiced recipes.
The final class, infrequently used spices, appear in less than 5% of recipes each: allspice, long pepper, and cubeb.
About one in seven of the recipes that specify spicing indicate that the brewer should use whatever spices they see fit; many of these give examples of the spices that should be considered.
The most common way of adding spices to mead is during the ferment, as opposed to herbs, which are more often added during the boiling stage. This is notable because these differing methods of flavor extraction will affect the amount and types of flavors extracted.
A number of these spices are uncommon in modern cooking, but even though they may be a challenge to find, all of these are worthy of brewing consideration specifically cubeb, grains of paradise, and long pepper.
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Herbs are a common additive in medieval, renaissance, and early modern mead recipes. They are present only slightly less commonly than spices and are often used alongside spices.
As with spices, many recipes calling for addition of herbs tell the mead maker to use whatever herbs they prefer.
About one third of the herbed recipes contain only a single herb and half have only one or two herbs. The most herbs in a single recipe is 50 (including flowers), but one in four has 6 or more herbs.
Reflecting a medical world where plants and herbs were used extensively to treat maladies of all sorts, many of the herbed mead recipes are medical in nature, or at least are attributed with medical properties.
There are about 400 different plant additions cataloged to date. About a quarter of these are only used in one recipe. The “average” herb appears in over 20 recipes.
But there are only a dozen herbs that each appear in more than 10% of herbed recipes:
Rosemary is the most common herb by a large margin. This herb was long considered somewhat of a miracle cure with all sorts of medical effects.
Sweet Briar (eglantine) and marjoram both appear in a number of recipes; marjoram is next in frequency.
Fennel as root, seed, or herb is the next most common addition.
Thyme and sweet balm (melissa) are both relatively common, as is sage, with several specific kinds of sage noted.
Hops are typically seen in meads with more recreational purposes, and often in great quantities.
Roses as petals or juice are a notable mead additive, mostly in drinks called rodomel.
The top dozen herbs are rounded out by bay, hyssop, and agrimony.
Last updated August 16, 2023
