SC - colewort

[Stephen Bloch]

> Margaret said:
> 
> There are period recipes for herb salad that don't require cooking. 
> Platina mentions eating various greens raw, including lettece, colewort,
> endive, ox-tongue, purslain, and chicory.  

Stefan replied:
> of the plants mentioned above, the only ones I recongnise are lettece
> (and that may not mean the lettece I think of), endive and chicory.

Sylvia Landsberg, in _The Medieval Garden_ (pub. Thames & Hudson, ISBN
0-500-01691-7), discusses the substitutions she had to make in
designing gardens for medieval living-history sites in England:

... The lack of a suitable small-headed cabbage is not so important as
the loss in England, only recently, of the colewort, ubiquitous in
medieval times, its nearest English relative being a non-curly kale.  At
present in the Bayleaf re-creation we grow its nearest European
equivalent, the American collard, probably introduced from Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  This, mixed with Hungry Gap Kale,
has proven to be the best way to achieve the all-year growth noted by
Jon Gardener in the fourteenth century.  In re-creation it is preferable
to use a 'look-alike' rather than omit a basic plant.

Landsberg reproduces a detail from Brueghel's "The Numbering at
Bethlehem" illustrating something she claims is colewort.  The picture
is fuzzy, but they look to me like Romaine lettuce raised several inches
off the ground by a stalk.  I don't know what collard and kale look like
in the field, so they could look like those too.

					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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