SC - Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras/Carnival and Ducal University

[david friedman]

Allison asks:
>Actually, how widespread was the use of whaling products?  Is this
>something our noble houses would have had available to order?  How about
>households like the Menagier's, or country estates like Lady Fettiplace's
>place?  Perhaps something like the whale oil would have been mainly
>available to seaside towns, and businesses such as sardines in oil, etc,
>for export inland as finished products.
>
Menagier writes: "GRASPOIS. This is salted whale, and should be sliced raw
and cooked in water like bacon; and serve with peas", and he has a pea
recipe which uses bacon for meat days and this salted whale on fish days.

The editor of the French text of Menagier has in a footnote to this: "A
lawsuit which lasted several years in the Paris parliament and which had to
do with the seven stalls owned by the king in the Paris markets, of which
stalls five were for salt fish and two for "craspois", tells us that the
"craspois" was only found in Paris in Lent: it was "Lenten bacon", the fish
for the poor; during Lent four thousand people lived on "craspois", dried
fish and herring."

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


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