SC - Lenten foods

[Stefan li Rous]

Greetings,

I had asked a while back about what was done with milk during Lent and
other days when milk use was restricted:
<<Or were these times when the milk wasn’t generally available>>

To which Ras, among others answered:

 To conclude my tho'ts about the use of excess milk during the Lenten
season,
 IIRC, the Lenten season is 40 days of mourning preceeding the memory of
the
 death of Jesus the Christ which ends with the celebration of His
ressurection
 on Easter Sunday. (Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong as my
 knowledge of Christian festivals is limited to those customs that
directly
 affect my own religion).  Traditional Easter cuisine features a LOT of
butter.
 So, IMHO, during the Middle Ages, the excess milk produced by cows
during the
 Lenten season was most probably made into butter and used to slop the
hogs.

 al-Sayyid Ras al-Zib, AoA, OSyc
=====================

Thank you folks. This confirms some of what I was wondering about. It
looks
like for single fast days, this had little effect but that animals were
still
milked and something was done with it. For the longer period of Lent,
the
animals were still milked, but this was a time of declining or
non-production
anyway.

It may well be that when the Church first set up these rules this was
even
more the case. Thus the rule originally made sense and caused little
hardship
upon it’s worshipers. But as agriculture changed and improved, and the
church
rules changed to dogma and tradition, this became less and less true.
First,
you get rule bending such as with new, uncodified animals (beaver
tails?)
and unborn rabbits. And then the rule gets thrown out in the
reformation. I
am not saying this caused the reformation, just that I think it may have

been another pressure spot. As with the continental plates, in Society
if
things don’t gradually change, the preasure builds up and you get an
earthquake or, in this case, the reformation.

Thoughts?

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net



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