ANST - Traveling INN
Mark.S Harris
rsve60 at email.sps.mot.com
Wed Apr 1 04:21:01 PST 1998
Dennis and/or Dory Grace wrote:
> As for the coffee, no coffee was not available in medieval Europe. It
> *was* available in Saracen lands, however, after the 8th century. So if
> you're in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the time of the crusades or in
> Egypt or Morocco in the 14th century, coffee is readily available. In
> fact, for those gentles stuck in said foreign lands, coffee is about *all*
> that's available. The Islamic traders won't carry wine because Mahomet
> told them wine is bad.
This is correct, although I believe you are a bit early on the 8th century date.
This has been an ongoing debate on the SCA-Cooks list. For those interested,
there is some more information on medieval coffee in this file in the BEVERAGES
section of my Florilegium:
coffee-msg (63K) 2/18/98 Coffee and coffee-type drinks.
Perhaps because of this alcohol restriction, the Arab world had a large
number of fruit and mint syrup based drinks. At least one of these, popularized
by Duke Cariadoc, Serkanjabaun, has become quite popular throughout the
Known World. You can find a number of recipes for such drinks in this file:
beverages-NA-msg (72K) 8/ 4/97 Non-alcoholic beverages.
> Cheesecake and chocolate aer, sadly, right out. Fresh fruit is always
> good, though.
This really depends upon your definition of "cheesecake". There were a
number of cheesecake-like desserts. See this file in the FOOD section:
cheesecake-msg (17K) 10/27/97 Medieval cheesecake. Recipes.
Chocolate, at least as we generally think of it, is sadly post period.
For more info on this take a look at:
chocolate-msg (32K) 7/15/97 History and description of early chocolate.
> Sir Lyonel Oliver Grace
Lord Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net
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