SC - Honey

[Baaastard@aol.com]

Hi, Katerine here.  Lord Ras responds to me:

><< 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.   >>
>
>Because the majority, if not all, of period recipe books were written for
>noble households, would not the proliferation of chicken recipes indicate
>that they were in fact not a common food item? Case in point would be the
>nobleman's desire to impress his guests with his wealth by serving  as many
>exotics as possible. What better way than to serve chicken. Just a tho't but
>, IMHO, not an unreasonable one. Conversely the less often an item is
>mentioned, the more "common" it may have been. Responce?

First of all, we don't know *who* most period recipe books were written
for.  There is pretty good internal evidence that most were written for
wealthy households, but that's a very different claim from noble.  The
evidence directly contradicts their being produced for royal ones: the
four manuscripts localized by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval
English, for instance, come from Essex, Cheshire, Hereford, and the 
northern midlands.

That being said: even if we assume that the cookbooks were developed for
noble households, it doesn't follow that they contain no dishes that common
people ate.  For one thing, every noble household fed hundreds of common
people.  For another, we have evidence that nobles ate some of the things
commoners ate.  For a third, cookbooks have recipes for things like 
frumenty, joutes, worts, and so on.  Unless one wants to argue that
common people didn't eat boiled grains and greens, we are forced to the
conclusion that a recipe appearing in a cookbook does not imply that
the foodstuffs in it were not commonly available and eaten.

Also: you only fed guests when they were there.  You fed the entire household,
from servants up, every mortal day.

In addition, the most common herbs in the medieval English corpus are
parsley, sage, and mint.  Parsley and sage are child's play to grow in an
English climate, and mint's a freaking weed.  If there are any growing
things that everybody's almost sure to have, these are among them.

Finally, even the richest households cannot generally afford to eat *only*
rare things.  They eat some rare things, yes.  But rice and potatoes hit
billionaires' tables.  The assumption that *everything*-- even every
preparation, let alone every *ingredient* -- that shows up frequently in
a cookbook is rare strikes me as massively implausible; and the assumption
that ingredients show up in inverse measure of their frequency in the 
overall diet strikes me as almost equally unlikely.

There is independent evidence that roast birds were high prestige foods.
What isn't entirely clear is the extent to which the prestige part came
from being able to afford the fuel and labor to roast them.  Chicken is
certainly considered upper-class fare.  I'm not sure that makes it even
relatively unavailable to common people, let alone rare overall.  At 
least equally likely, in some measure, is the hypothesis that only rich
people could afford to eat young, tender chicken (and to have capons cut),
rather than tossing exhausted layers and tough old roosters into the pot.

We don't know.  And guessing is dangerous.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry