SC - Harpestrengs-manuscript: Was: Re: Northern Foods
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Fri Aug 6 11:03:42 PDT 1999
> > Bear, I think, posted about the length of days being such that the grain
> > would ripen in the shorter number of days. It may be a case of choosing
> > to
> > harvest when the grain and the weather was at a certain stage rather
>than
> > risk waiting a few days or weeks longer. >
> > Bonne
>
>Most grains ripen between 90 and 120 days with dependencies on water and
>sunlight.
>
>I've never seen a reference to harvesting the unripened grain. I can see
>it
>when trying to salvage the crop from disasterous weather. Or, it may have
>possibly been common practice during the cooler climate of the "Little Ice
>Age."
Given all the other recipes requiring grain of all sorts, I don't think
anyone used up _all_ their flour at once on bread. The supposition I was
trying to make in my second post was not that they purposely harvested
unripe grain, but knowingly began the harvest a bit sooner just to be on the
safe side. Perhaps conditions, such as the "Little Ice Age", or communal
knowledge of what happened in worst-case years led them to starting the
harvest a bit early and some of the grain wasn't as ripe as it might be. And
so, mass baking just in case. This only makes sense if a portion of unripe
grain would cause the whole lot to spoil in storage, like one bad apple and
the whole barrel?
The difficulty in firing a bread oven in winter under scandanivian
conditions makes more sense though, I think now. Fuel saving is as quite
important as food saving.
>The fact that this information is referenced only in the Time-Life
>series makes it suspect. I have some severe problems with the quality of
>the history in some of the other Time-Life series and I would prefer to see
>better documented references to the practice.
Yes, me too! Since I hadn't said it the first time, I thought it was
important to get it out there. Unfortunatly, it's the only one of the
available (to me) cook books that even makes an attempt to give any history.
The others just rave on about "tradition".
Bonne
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