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<nomobile>[[File:Barbieri, Paolo Antonio - The Spice Shop - 1637.jpg|thumb|left|Remember to grind your ingredients very finely and mix them thoroughly for their humoral properties to cancel each other out.]]</nomobile>
If you wish to neutralize the humoral properties of one or more of your ingredients, then a rather obvious method is to mix them with ingredients having that have opposite complexions. For example, fat is rich in ''water'', so you can temper the ''dryness'' and ''hotness'' of red meat by larding. Sugar, ''moist'' and ''warm'' is commonly added to most ''cold'' dishes, even if these are not really desserts in the 21st-century sense. The natural ''moistness'' of fish is often counterbalanced by sprinkling it with vinegar or lime juice. This general neutralization method is more effective, if you can break down the ingredients into tiny bits and mix them all well. You can, for instance, mix ''cold'' vinegar with ''hot'' mustard seeds, but it's better to first grind the seeds down to a paste – which, incidentally, is how you make [[Ketchup_vs_Mustard#Mustard, “an Uncommon Condiment”|mustard]]. This is why mortar, pestles, graters and sieves are among the most important kitchen utensils.
The vast majority of spices and herbs (especially dried) is ''hot'' and ''dry'', whick makes them perfect for tempering the phlegmatic nature of some meats, like pork. Sprinkling, though, is not as effective as sticking, hence the great popularity of thick, spicy sauces. Even better is to mix spices with aspic (which, in itself, is ''cold'' and ''dry'') and pour this mixture onto meat, creating a galantine, one of the favourite dishes of medieval Europe. It's also important to give the various ingredients enough time for their elements to neutralize each other. In some extreme cases, you have to start the process of combining the ingredients while one of them is still alive. Hence recipes which instruct you to kill lampreys by drowning them in wine, bury live eels in salt or force-feed a well-fattened capon with vinegar.
