SC - Good News - OT

[Mordonna22@aol.com]

Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:
> Howdy all from Anne-Marie
> 
> re: beef stew type units in period...
> 
> the only exmaples I've seen of meat stewed with veggies (other than the
> onion/meat stuff ubiquitous throughout the medieval corpus) are the late
> srouces like Robert May, and Digby and friends. 

Some things to add to the um, pot:

So far, other than brief mentions of Islamic dishes and a couple of
Europeans which may or may not come under the heading of an actual,
modernish stew, depending on who you talk to, we seem to be
concentrating on English sources. 

A point that might be worth considering is that the kind of archetypal
stew Americans think of, with potatoes, onions, carrots, celery, maybe
mushrooms or peas, etc., appears to be of comparatively late
development, and is _comparatively_ rare outside of the English-speaking
world. Yes, there are numerous stewed dishes in France and , but they
may contain onions only, or mushrooms, or a very specific garnish
mixture of, say, petits pois, pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon.

I wonder if perhaps Americans have developed a style of meat stew based
on somewhat simpler and more basic colonial-era kitchens, and a desire
to stretch the meat, while Europeans have also taken steps to stretch
meat, but using different methods that don't seem to dilute it as much
(i.e. boiling a pudding in a cloth in the stew pot, serving with rice,
bread, pasta, potatoes cooked on the side, or any of several other
methods). Other than the simple, moot, academic question of whether beef
stew along the lines of Dinty Moore's, or, I hope, something of
infinitely better quality, is "period", I'm not quite sure what the
point of this discussion is. Not that that matters especially, of course.

Did I miss it when someone said, "I know how to make modern beef stew,
so I want to cook it at a feast, is it period?"

FWIW, by the way, I recently read an article by the late Rudolf Grewe,
which discussed a 12th-13th century (I think) Spanish cookbook, for
which he had been working on a translation. (I'm still sorking on
finding this, before anyone asks. It's possible it was never finished
and never published.) He claimed the book is one of few that contain
clearly Spanish dishes that may predate the arrival of Islam in Spain,
and several apparently Islamic dishes that are clearly defined as
different from similarly-named Islamic dishes from the Arabian peninsula
or other Moorish lands, in their specific use of olive oil and butter
instead of lamb tail fat and sesame oil. One such dish, as I recall, was
a clear precursor to olla podrida, containing both several meats and
several vegetables. Unfortunately Grewe gives no really detailed description.
   
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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