SC - Butter-oops

[Uduido@aol.com]

Stefan li Rous writes:

> It was my understanding that butter was eaten by the lower classes but not
> by the upper but I don't have referances to back this up. Anyone else know?
> Lord Ras, is it possible that the sources you have been looking at are
> primarily just for the upper class and thus would miss the use of butter by
> other classes in/on food?
> 
> I remember some arguments in previous years on whether "honey butter" was
> period at all. If even "herb butter" and butter were not period, what was
> eaten on bread? Anything?

>From the 13th-century Arabo-Andalusian "Manuscrito Anonimo", a chapter
entitled "The Customs that Many People Follow in Their Countries":
	...  Many people eat butter, and add it to bread, while others
	cannot bear to smell it, much less to eat it....

The same source includes numerous recipes calling for butter.  In
particular, a variety of pastries called by the general term "rafis"
(e.g. musahada, markaba, muqawwara, et multae cetera) seem to be topped
with a mixture of melted butter and honey, as often as not poured into a
hole poked in the pastry (although I haven't seen any reference to
mixing honey and butter at room temperature, or allowing the mixture to
cool to room temperature before use, as seems common at SCA feasts).
Butter also appears in Arabo-Andalusian sources in making pie crusts,
again in making puff pastry, and often as a lubricant in meat dish.

What the barbarians beyond the Pyrenees do with butter is their
problem. :-)
					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University