Fermented Beverage Recipe Question(was:RE: SC - Michael Scott Shappe <mikey at Hundred-Acre-Wood.com>: Re: [Mid] Society for CREATIVE Ana chronism

[Decker, Terry D.]

> I have heard that the first *recipe* for bread dates from somewhere in the
> 14th ot 15th centuries.  This doesn't mean that bread isn't period for
> earlier times.  I was told that they didn't write a recipe because
> everyone *knew* how to make bread.  Does this hold true for fermented
> beverages?  Does the literacy rate amongst the alewives have an effect on
> this and how most of their knowledge was probably verbal?  Or, is there
> some other reason (like some crazy people buyrned most of the books with
> beer recipes in them? hehe)?
> 
> Thank you,
> Avelina Keyes
> Barony of the Bridge
> East Kingdom
> 
The first recipe for bread is Sumerian and is around 5000 years old.  It is
for an unleavened barley bread which is both eaten and used as the primary
ingredient in Sumerian beer.  Pliny the Elder provides enough information,
that one could recreate bread as made by the Goths.  And there are also
non-European bread recipes from earlier in the SCA period. 

The recipes of which you are thinking are Platina's bread recipe, rastons
from the Harleian manuscripts (if I remember the correct source) and a
recipe for manchets from the Good Huswife's Jewell (again from memory).
There are a number of recipes published immediately after period which are
probably a good example of Elizabethean baking.  My opinion of these recipes
is they are taken from the baking for manors or large households rather than
commercial baking.

Baking and brewing seems to have been common, especially on farms and
estates.  Towns were a different matter.  Commercial bakers and brewers were
members of guilds which purchased specific rights for specific areas.  For
example, medieval bakers owned the ovens, and in many towns, no one other
than the bakers was allowed an oven for bread.  In such a case, the baker
made bread to sell, and, for fee, would bake a householders dough or make
bread from the ingredients provided.

While the lack of recipes is probably due to a low literacy rate, it is also
possible that the lack of recipes demonstrates the strength and secrecy of
the bakers and brewers guilds.  Bakers and brewers spent years learning and
improving their craft and shared their knowledge only with a few apprentices
and journeymen, so even if the information was written down, it would have
only been given to a guild member. 

Bear
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