SC - Lenten foods

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi all from Anne-Marie:
re: lenten foods

> 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 Thus the rule originally made sense and caused little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. 

I know people say this is the case, but I have yet to see a single recipe
in medieval cookbooks, or a single example in the numerous menus from
primary sources of people eating beaver, baby rabbits, or even barnicle
goose on a fast day. The closest thing to "cheating" I see on these menus
(Chiquart, Taillevent and le Menagier, as well as the English corpus) is
porpoise as fish, but a suprising number of  modern adults today don't
realize that porpoises are mammals and not fish.

The more I learn about the real middle ages, the more I realize that most
of the stuff I thought I "knew" was a bunch of urban legends and
misinformation propogated by undereducated (and underpaid) fifth grade
teachers and bad Errol Flynn movies. Please, if anyone can show, with
primary sources that medieval people were so unpious as to bend the rules
like that, or were so ignorant as to really think that fetal material was
not really meat, I'd love to hear about it.

- --Anne-Marie, always ready to be shown where she's wrong
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