SC - Lamb!!! (and kids)

[Par Leijonhufvud]

Bogdan asked about a topping for a late period almond tart; someone
suggested peach jam and Charles McCathieNevile answered:

>Peaches are appropriate for England. But I don't know how they
>prepared/preserved them. I would imagine that something like jam was
>done. Has anybody checked the florilegium?
>Charles
>
According to _Food and Drink in Britain_ by C. Anne Wilson (very
knowlegable and reliable), marmelade in the sense of a stiff paste seems to
have been invented late in our period and "Sometimes soft fruits were
simply bruised and boiled quickly in sugar syrup without any sieving or
straining, and the resultant sweet compressed mass became vulgarly known as
"jam".  The word did not reach the printed cookery books until 1718, but
thereafter both the name and the method of preparation became common..."

So it is not clear if anyone would have been making jam by the end of our
period (though the almond tart this discussion started with is late
period).  I think the reason jam got invented so late was that earlier
sugar was an expensive import, used in spice-type quantities only by
upper-class people; even for them, using it in the mass quantities
necessary for preserving fruit would not have been a practical option.  By
Elizabethan and Stuart times a lot more sugar was being imported, and it
was being used a lot more and moving down the social scale.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


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