SC - The Dom AND the Ro

[Kiriel & Chris]

At 11:38 AM -0400 6/9/98, Nick Sasso wrote:

>If you will please pardon the interception, I can offer some answers:
>
>1) at some places in the middle ages, brewing was Guild controlled.
>They were reticent to give secrets to any non-guild members.

I have often heard such assertions--do we have any evidence? The one
(slightly OOP) source I know of for lots of fermented drinks is Digby, and
it certainly sounds as though recipes for fermented drinks were circulating
freely in his time, and as though they were frequently made in large
households, not bought. Wouldn't you expect the same thing to be true
throughout the middle ages for anything made from local ingredients--i.e.
beer and mead but not (in England) wine? And my general impression is that
in wine making areas, wine making was something all the peasants were
doing, not a specialized elite.

>2)  The recipes were handed down generations, not in cookbooks.

But why was that any more true than for cooking recipes--of which we have
many more?

>4) Mead recipes went away REAL early as grapes usurped honey as a
>cheaper fermentable sugar in the meditteranean basin.  Honey still was
>produced, but was too expensive to import to use for wines in
>volume.....grapes grew far cheaper and reliably in volume locally as time
>went on.

Judging by Digby, honey based drinks were still common in England in the
17th century.

David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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