Cool Off With Coriander

Back before doctors understood how our metabolism works, they tended to think of it as a balance of abstract forces. The ancient Greeks came up with the doctrine of the humors, which held that your health, and even your personality, were based on the exact proportion of hot, cold, moist and dry elements in your body. In a simpler form--just hot versus cold--this idea is still lively in various countries, notably Iran and China.

So to medieval doctors, the important thing about your diet was not proteins, carbohydrates and vitamins but keeping the humors balanced. Meat was “hot,” and so were all spices except coriander, so medieval Arab recipes always threw in some nice cooling coriander in meat dishes, just to be on the safe side.

Some medieval cookbooks gravely warned against eating fresh fish unless it was fried. Fish is cold and moist by nature, so it would cause “moist illnesses,” such as colds, unless healthfully cooked in fat. There are recipes that recommend salting fish “until it drips” before daring to cook it.

The extreme case of all this was worrying about the humors of your cooking utensils. The Greeks never went that far, but a 10th century Arab cookbook analyzed various materials--iron, copper, tin, stone, lead, even various kinds of wood--for their humoral value. Fortunately, this was just some theorist spinning his gears. To judge from medieval recipes, cooks utterly ignored the idea, though maybe just to avoid having to buy a lot of extra cookware.