SC - advice/help: shish kebabs period?

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi all from Anne-Marie

Kat asks:
> 	Can anyone give an estimation of whether the concept of shish kebab is
period?  (I'm not talking about California kay-bobs with cherry tomatoes,
bell peppers and pineapple here.  I'm just looking for a skewer or blade
with meats impaled on it and grilled thusly; and how they were seasoned.)
> 
> 	
Heck yah!!!!!
We got pictures in 14th century manuscripts of people impaling chickens on
long sticky things and putting them over fires. We got pictures in the
bayeaux tapestry of the same thing. Chiquart specifically mentions that you
should be sure to have enough spits and skewers in the kitchen.

There are numerous recipes in the corpus where meat is specified to be
stuck then roasted. In several, they mention specifically that you are to
catch the juices to baste with. Alas, I haven't done much work with that
particular cooking method (apartment dwelling with no balcony, and they
frown on building fires in the living room), so dont have any
reconstructions, but look at the original yrchons recipes, "balls" from le
menagier, etc. Every cookbook I've ever looked at had something that gave
cooking on a spit as one of the methods.

Hope this helps,
- --AM
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