SC - trencher history guesses

[Decker, Terry D.]

> I believe the chipped beef on toast pre dates medieval times....
> 
> I believe that people have been putting things on bread and toast and
> putting the heel
> of the bread in soup/stew since the day after bread was invented.
> 
Twenty-five thousand years of practice, four thousand of it with leavened
bread before we get to medieval times.  They ought to have had it right by
then.

> I have read  in more than one cookbook and history of food book that
> "bread was the
> staff of life and everything else was just something to go with bread".
> 
The average daily allowance of bread in the 14th and 15th Century was
approximately two pounds per day.  This appears to have held true in a
number of countries.  Add to that approximately one gallon of brew per day
and the common use of cooked grain and you get the idea cereals were the
single major source of food in period.  Staff of life sounds about right.  

> I have read that it was considered rude to eat your trencher at the big
> fancy feasts.
> So, some people must have eaten them for it to be talked about.    The
> beggars ate the
> trenchers.  And some people did eat them the next day dipped in wine.  Why
> would you
> not eat the lovely bit of bread that just soaked up the juices of your
> meat?  My guess?
> Because you needed to save room of the more expensive treats to come, and
> to prove you
> had enough to eat without eating your trencher. (status symbol)  I believe
> the medieval
> surfs and beggars and working classes would have all eaten their trenchers
> without a
> second thought.
> 
Emily Post wasn't around so John Russell and his Boke of Nurture were the
arbiters of etiquette.  Trenchers were bread of the second quality, totally
unfit for consumption by the "upper crust."  Donating their trenchers to the
poor was good form, a status symbol and Christian charity rolled into one.
Besides, let's use the pandemayne for sops and sippets.

Beggars were the ones who got the trenchers at the kitchen door.  Serfs and
the rabble didn't dine in high state and probably couldn't read Russell
anyway.  They most likely ate out of bowls rather than off trenchers and
dipped whatever bread they had in their pottage. 


> So, I think that not eating the bread under your food is an aberration,
> not the norm,
> in the long history of food.   I will go a step farther to say, I even
> think that it is
> an aberration for the medieval times as well,  because more people than
> not, would have
> been to poor to throw away that bread.
> 
>                                                     I am ready for your
> slings and
> arrows.
> 
>                                                                     Helen
> 
You're mixing manners and classes.  The rabble are invariably unrefined
brutes, who do not come up to the standards of the rich and powerful.  Since
they are not so refined or wealth, they commit such an obvious faux pas as
eating their trenchers, if they have trenchers to eat.

Bear 

============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================