Subject: SC - almond milk

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 06:58:00 -0600
> From: "Mark.S Harris" <rsve60 at email.sps.mot.com>
> Subject: SC - almond milk
> =

> I thought almonds were fairly common. Does anyone have any idea how
> common they were through northern France or England as opposed to
> southern Europe?

Almonds grow much better in a warm climate. It's possible that they grew
in places that were warmer in the Middle Ages than they are today, but
my impression is that they were not grown extensively in Northern Europe
at any time. They were certainly used, at least by the wealthy, whose
recipes seem to be what have survived, but it's a fairly safe bet they
were imported from the same place the raisins, dates, and currants came
from, more or less.
>  =

> Another question just occured to me. Has anyone ever charted the fast
> days when almond milk was used instead of animal milk? What happens
> if you stop milking your livestock during these times? Does the milk
> dry up? Or were these times when the milk wasn=92t generally available
> anyway? Or would they have continued milking the animals and just =

> thrown out the milk (which I doubt) or make products that would
> keep such as cheese?

I don't mean to oversimiplify the answer: I'm sure there's a lot more to
this question than I address here, but it does seem Lent coincides
nicely with the season between lambing and weaning. Probably a good deal
of the milk was drunk by baby animals of various types. I'm not aware of
too much cheese being made in the spring, but it may be a situation
where aged cheeses are made in the fall, since they would be needed for
winter, and fresh cheeses were made for immediate consumption more or
less all year round. My impression is that peak milk production would be
from roughly March through September or October, and it may well have
been that milk was most available for human consumption in late summer
through mid-fall, with a dry spell of sorts during the winter.

Maybe some dairy folks could help out here? I'm a city boy myself.

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================