“Spices are antimicrobial.”
“Recipes apear to use spices in ways that increase their effectiveness. ... other spices, like cilantro, whose antimicrobial properties might be demaged by heating are added fresh in recipes.”
There’s more, but some of the statements are that combinations of spices are effective where isolated spices are not.
Now for years I have
No ground ginger? Use a bit of nutmeg. No sugar? Use molasses. No molasses? Use treacle. No black pepper? Use a smidgin of paprika.
Henrich makes the good point that we are dependent on cooked foods now, but that very few of us know (a) how to start a fire and (b) which plants (outside the supermarket) are not poisonous.
Rceipes for cooking, he says, are the direct result of hundreds of generations of trial and error.
That sounds to me that recipes ought not to be modified at all.
And yet I still wonder about recipes that call for what seem to be like whimisical lists of ingredients.
I am likely to reduce the number of ingredients to my ginger cake recipe, perhaps removing nutmeg and cinammon, leaving only ground ginger. But maybe the combination of spices, in a precise ratio, is essential to the cake.
(signed) “Un-nerved” of Toronto
