My bedtime reading currently is Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book. Elizabethan and Jacobean recipes are set out in the original flexible spelling, then explained and commented on by the erudite Hilary Spurling. The seasonality of cooking is one thing that hits you - Mrs Spurling set it out by month - but also the flavours that the cook in those times most leaned on, some of which we use very little today.
Is this a matter of fashion, availability, or does taste evolve in some way perhaps to keep pace with technological change - the fridge and freezer, rapid transport - and the 'new' ingredients that become available?
I like to think I use a wide palette of spices and other flavour enhancers, but some things that were central to old Elinor's culinary world are pretty alien to mine - I wonder who nowadays really uses the cloves they buy, for example? Even in bread sauce I would use nutmeg in place of the overpowering clove. But at least I have a little bottleful in my cupboard whereas rosewater is absent - I had a bottle years ago and think it disappeared through a temporal warp vortex, as one day it was gone though I'd hardly used a drop. Rosewater for the Jacobean cook was the stock-cube of today's, which says a great deal about our loss of subtlety.
A myth should be debunked here: spices were probably not then used much if at all to mask meats etc going off, they were far too expensive to waste thus, and those with the money to spend on exotic ingredients would not have been foolish enough to endanger their health with rotting flesh, or desperate enough to have to. Spices were used to produce food that tasted good.
Our contemporary love of nutmeg and mace links us with those times, even moreso perhaps cinnamon. I very occasionally use Orange Flower Water too. Cloves have a flavour that I associate with the cooking of relatives long deceased. But it is not just spices that seem to fade away in cooking. Take raisins: in my Sixties and Seventies childhood they were included in curries, cakes and pies, covered in chocolate as a special treat to be eaten in the cinema, the tough little buggers eaten I'd estimate twice a week. I barely use them now, and have to buy them in specially when needed. Elinor Fettiplace seems to have employed them for every other dish. As my son loathes all dried fruit perhaps they will fade out of the culinary picture entirely when his generation pushes mine away from the hob.
We should not forget such ingredients, so I am going to make an effort to use the occasional clove, hide raisins - one 'receipt' in the book for chicken cooked in mutton broth has raisins (later sieved out) to add depth and sweetness for example - and buy rosewater too. In austerity terms these things should attract the cook for giving loads of taste for very little money - a single clove makes itself known in a big apple pie. More bang for your groat as it were.
Two huge tubers (cost 86p) were boiled whole for 15 minutes, then skinned - it just wrinkles off when pushed with the thumb. Sliced thickly they were put in a gratin dish into which was poured to come close to the top a mixture of hot ham stock, the juice of two oranges (rather sad overlooked specimens from the fruit-bowl), a tablespoon of rosewater, and a big lump of butter, all previously stirred together so the butter had time to melt. The surface was sprinkled with a little sugar, and the dish then cooked in the oven for about 45 minutes at 180C - until the top slices took a knife point easily, a question of judgement as they were slightly candied.