SC - Thoughts on Medieval food

[Mary Morman]

On Mon, 1 Feb 1999 Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:

> But isn't it true My Lord that in "the olden days" it was either feast or
> famine?'  Meat was not eaten every day as in the recent past.    So that when
> there WAS meat, it was "feast & enjoy yourself"  And eating was a way to keep
> healthy! (back then.)
> 
> Phillipa

I think that this is another "medieval myth".  Certainly there were famine
years.  And meat was limited by the church for certain days of the week
and seasons of the year.  That very fact brings us back to the old truism
of historiography - you don't make a law against something unless people
are doing it.  That the church limited consumption of meat was a clear
indicator that on non-fast days people were regularly eating meat.

Certain classes of people had less meat, or their intake of meat was
seasonal (there's a great quote from Piers Plowman about this) but for the
upperclasses meat was a way of life, and providing it in an non-rotten
form would have been the joint job of the cooks and the stewards of the
estate.

I've recently been working from the Andalusian cookbook and one of the
biggest differences between this Arabic work and similar ones from the
Christian world is that -everything- has meat in it!  A recipe for
eggplant starts, "first cut your lamb up small...".  This leads me to
believe that the reason we see non-meat dishes in the other cookbooks is
so that cooks could accomodate the fast days of the church, not because
people chose to eat meals without meat.

Elaina

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