SC - Rarity of Fermantation recipes (was Fermented Beverage Recipe

[Nick Sasso]

The Digby source is a post-rennaissance collection of recipes.   I'm not
sure that his book should be taken to mean that the recipes were
ubiquitous.  If they were, I would suspect that they would find  more
print than this one volume.  

The guild assertion is just one of several I offer as I know that there
were many who brewed who were not guildsmen.  The recipes of
import and renown, though, were guild.  If you didn't buy guild brews,
you bught guild materials.  

Another thing to consider is that manors had breweries in many
cases....and they were run by the manor women.  I do not pretend
authority on literacy, but it seems with all that needed to be dome on the
manor with cooking, brewing, and childcare, recipe/book writing for
dissemination would fall low on the list.  The reference to women as
brewers comes from account of Elizabethan manor: notes and journals
of a manor loard.

According to a doctoral dissertation I recently read, villages had
alewives to brew for the masses.  It wasn't that you couldn't make
beer, just that you didn't have time to tend to your profession and brew
enough beer for the year.  The ale wife would place a staff sticking out
of the thatched roof indicating the location.......it would change on
occasion due to illness, pregnancy, family need, etc.  Again suggesting
some limitation on the proliferations of recipes for brewing.  I know that
anyone with fruit juice and air can make wine.......just not good wine. 
Same with any fermented foodstuff.  The issue is that of tested and
controlled recipes for ingredients and techniques.

I'm not at all cdrtain why we have many more cookbooks than brewing
books...that's why the idea that good brewing was not done by every
breathing individual comes to my head so much.  Religious orders had
their secrets (still no hints as to recipes of those pesky trappists......
only approximations and guesses), as did probably anyone else who
could keep them.  I haven't come across any explainations for the lack
of brewing recipes over cooking books.

As for honet drinks, they were there, just not produced in 100 gallon
batches on every manor.  Your assertion of brewing being done with
local produce makes sense, as does the expense and proliferation of
the fermentable.  Grains and grapes seem logically to be in far greater
production than honey would have been.  They assuredly had honey,
but it was also there primary sweetener prior to sugar, and took large
quantities to create mead.  Still used, but not for volume daily
consumption, in likelihood.

Thanks for challenging my ideas.....made me jell the premises,

niccolo difrancesco

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/



============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================