ANST - Steaks, Beans, and Other Questionable Foods

Mark.S Harris rsve60 at email.sps.mot.com
Thu Sep 10 10:21:40 PDT 1998


Meadhbh replied to Gilli's comment:
> > Gilli writes :
> >
> > My  point is not everyway things could have been done was written down for
> > history to take a look at.  If you can think of a way to do it with basicaly
> > period materials, then someone probably did it that way.
> 
> Maybe, but probably not.  Let's look at how meat is cut today compared with the
> middle ages.  Modern butchers have band saws available which makes cutting
> steaks and smaller cuts very easy.  Back then, it was difficult to do at best.
> It is much easier to disjoint an animal than to cut through the bones into 1
> 1/2-2 inch slabs of meat.  And since it would be difficult, at best, to cook
> this cut of meat for 500 plus guests.
> Remember, you couldn't go to a butcher back then and buy a 'slab o bovine'.

No, they did NOT necessarily do it in a modern way even if they had the materials
to do it. Finding out the reasons for this can make the study of the Middle Ages
more interesting.

For instance, an example that comes to mind because of recent readings is
meringue. Sorry, not sure I've spelled it correctly. The white, fluffy,
foam that we often use on top of pies. They had egg whites. But meringue
does really appear until the eighteenth century, although there was a
similar concotion in the 17th century called "snow".

Well, why wasn't it a period dish? Yes, it requires something like a fork
to froth it up. But forks were known in the 1300's in Italy and near the
end of SCA period in England. If you don't have a fork, it can be done
with a bundle of branches. In part it may be that they didn't use egg
whites by themselves that much. In part I think they just didn't think of it.

It may also have had to do with medieval medical philosophy. Humorial
theory apparently frowned on egg whites. Egg yolks were good. Egg whites
were not at least by themselves.

So no, this idea that if they'd had the materials they would have done it, just
doesn't hold. I'm sure there are other examples that folks could come up with.

Meadhbh comments about the difficulty of cutting steaks are good to remember.
We did have an extensive discussion a while back on the Cook's list on period
meat butchering. What came out of that was that if you were on the manor in
the country the butchering would have been done there. If you were in town,
there were commercial butchers who would butcher your animals or sell chunks
of other animals. Many of these comments are in this file in the COMMERCE
section of my Florilegium files including some referances and period quotes
on butchering:

p-butchering-msg  (31K) 10/ 7/97    Medieval meat butchering of animals.

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net
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