SC - Chicken usage

[Stephen Bloch]

Ras wrote:

> 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?

Obviously, by extending this reason to its absurd extreme, one learns that
the average medieval European peasant dined daily on microwaved small
furry creatures from the planet Zrax (and what was the name of that Klingon
delicacy that looks like live earthworms?).

Backing away from the absurd extreme, it's true that medieval European
nobles were wealthier than the peasants.  It's true that they seem to
have liked to show off this fact: I doubt medieval peasants ever served
one another a peacock with its skin and feathers sewn back on, or a
cockatrice made from two chickens and a pig.  But they were far less
wealthy than, say, the average working-class American today, measured
in access to ingredients.  Medieval European nobles COULD NOT have
eaten fresh fruits or vegetables out of season, for example (something
modern Americans take for granted).  And although they could and did
slaughter both bitterns and chickens, the obvious interpretation of the
far greater number of chicken recipes than bittern recipes is that
chickens were easily domesticated (a fact which would apply equally
well to middle-class and poor people), not that bitterns were too
"common" for the royal cooks to bother writing about.

Ras's argument suggests a negative correlation between the food habits
of the nobility and the food habits of the peasantry, on grounds of a
"showoff" effect.  But ease and availability argue just as strongly for
a positive correlation.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University