SC - Butter-oops

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Lord Ras writes:

>I looked up recipes that called for butter and found a few. However, my
>original intent was to say that butter was not usually consumed by the
>nobility.
>
>"In Medieval Europe, butter was plentiful, so it was viewed as fit only for
>poor folk to eat.....[from 'Rich Man, Poor Man, Butter Man...';The Great Food
>Almanac (A Feast of Facts From A to Z); Irene Chalmers; pg. 169; pub.
>Collins; c. 1994]

It's wise to take any statement as sweeping as this with a grain (and
sometimes a pillar) of salt.  Attitudes toward butter seem to be strongly
conditioned by time and place.  As a very broad generalization, outside
of the Islamic world, southern Europe seems to have preferred olive oil,
while northern Europe preferred meat fats -- either butter or white
grease.  Olive oil is mentioned in 13th to 15th century English cuisine,
but less often than butter, and many many times less often than grease.

Meat fats were used for two general kinds of purposes: to raise the fat 
content of a dish, and to fry in.  For frying, northern Europeans seem 
overwhelmingly to have preferred white grease to butter.  This may be 
strongly influenced by the fact that butter (unless it has been clarified, 
a technique mentioned commonly in Spanish and Islamic sources but not 
elsewhere) burns at far lower temperatures than grease.  Butter also was
not used to lard meats for spit roasting, very likely for the same reason.

For increasing fat content, butter does not seem to have been all that
strongly dispreferred to grease in those areas that prefer meat fats.

>it is still my opinion that bread would have been "spread" with the much
>tastier olive oil. 

This is very plausible for Italy and southern France, but relatively
unlikely for northern France, England, Germany, and northern Europe in
general. 

>"Bread and butter" is a common item in the Current Middle
>Ages, agreed. So aren't chickens . But chickens were not a "common" food
>during the Middle Ages 

Do you mean that chickens were not eaten by peasants, or that they were not
common in upper class cuisine?  The first, I have little information on;
but the second is patently false.  Chicken is the single most common form
of flesh in 13th to 15th century English recipes; the only thing that comes
close to rivaling it is pork.  It is almost two and a half times as common
as beer (including veal), and on the order of ten times as common as
deer.  

For details, see http://www.watervalley.net/users/jtn/Articles/game.html.

>It is also my contention that bread was
>almost universally dipped in broths,etc. (e.g. "sops") thus negating the
>widespread use of any spread being necessary. I would welcome any further
>tho'ts or info in this area.

Period serving manuals indicate that tables were set with large amounts
of bread completely apart from trenchers, and that bread was always on
the table with cheese and fruit before the first course arrived.  This
would tend to go against your contention.  There are recipes for sops,
but they are not all that common; and while it is highly probable that
bread was dipped in other broths and sauces, we have no evidence
that it was *only* used so, and considerable reason to doubt it.  On
the other hand, the same serving manuals make no mention of putting 
butter on the table (or olive oil); which suggests that neither was it
spread with substances of that kind, at least much of the time.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry