Northern Foods was Re: SV: SC - Introducing Myself

[Bonne of Traquair]

> > 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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