SC - Catsup

[Philip & Susan Troy]

GARNER at admin.hnc.edu wrote:
 
> It's that time of the year again, where I make myself a year's worth
> of catsup because I make it with our local (No.Cal.) Santa Rosa
> plums.

Not aware of any per se. I just saw a plum recipe in the Forme of Cury
the other day; I'll see if I can find it. Also, I suppose it might be
acceptable to the authenticity mavens to use plums instead of pears in a
variant on Compost, which is a sort of mixed fruit/vegetable chutney
very similar to modern Tuscan mustard fruits. Catsup, plum or otherwise,
is linguistically bound up with a product found in the Far East and
which became known in the West in, I believe, the 18th century.

> Also, in her discussion of bread, she
> makes the startling [to me] statement that "we have no medieval
> bread recipes."  Could that really be true?

Technically, depending on how you define "medieval", this is more or
less true, as far as I know. There is a recipe for Rastons, which
includes a recipe for the bread required to make them, an Islamic recipe
for a sort of laminated compound pancake bread whose name escapes me at
the moment, and Gervase Markham's recipe for manchets, which is from
around 1615 and therefore not strictly medieval.

Adamantius