SC - Help I need drinks

[Stephen Bloch]

Sara writes:

> I am looking for drinks that were used in period.  Can anyone please tell
> me sources or even recipes?

Beer.  Ale.  Wine.  Mead.  (Mildly) alcoholic beverages seem to have
been much more widely used in the Middle Ages than today: they were
given to children, and supplied as part of many workers' daily wages.
(Suddenly I remember a fascinating paper I heard at the ACTA conference
two years ago, pointing out a dramatic shift in England over the course
of the 14th century from using grain for bread to using grain for beer
and ale.  Somebody in the audience asked whether the geographic data
had been correlated with the student populations of Cambridge and
Oxford....)

I've always assumed people drank a lot of alcoholic beverages because
the alcohol tended to kill the disease-causing organisms one might find
in plain water in a densely-populated area.  Even today, Europeans don't
drink plain water, and if you ask for it in a restaurant they figure you
must be an American.

There are non-alcoholic period beverages too, but most of the recipes
we have for them come from Arabic sources.  (Alcohol is forbidden to
Moslems, although the strictness of the prohibition depends on which
school of halakhic interpretation you follow.  They certainly had a
date wine called _nabid_, there are lots of Arabic and Persian poems
about wine, and there are lots of stories of Moslems sneaking off to
Christian monasteries to get wine from the monks.)  The 13th-c.
Arabo-Andalusian _Manuscrito Anonimo_ contains a lengthy chapter on
drink syrups, made by mixing sugar, water, and some flavoring agent.
The flavoring agents range from innocuous-sounding things like lemon
juice, pomegranate juice, vinegar, and mint, to weird and complex
decoctions of a dozen different herbs.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University
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