SC - Book opinions

[Philip & Susan Troy]

"Oughton, Karin (GEIS, Tirlan)" wrote:
> 
> > Food and Feast in Medieval England ~ 

>         I found this good for general information about culinery matters -
> it gave more of a overall feel of how the diet was structured through the
> classes , rather than specific recipes and dishes. It also concentrated very
> heavily on documented sources of food to create this diet categorisation,
> which while it is accurate in the sense that it is PROVABLE , gave me a
> slightly uneasy feeling because of the fact that it ignored food that is
> freely available in nature.
> 
>         Having just made nettle soup, dosed my cold with elderflower cold,
> had plantain salad for lunch and with pots of elderflower sorbet in the
> freezer, I wonder how important 'gathered' or 'kitchen garden' food woould
> have been medievally and hence how much the book ignores by concentrating on
> the documented facts only.

That would, of course, assume that usage of such foods is not documented
in the mainstream period sources, which is not entirely the case. There
are numerous elderflower recipes, for example, also hawthorne, etc. 

Also, one should bear in mind that even in the kind of urban setting
many of the "royalty-type" cookery books seems to be set in, there was
more open countryside immediately outside the towns where such wild
foods could be gathered. In some cases the gathering of completely wild
(uncultivated except for organized harvesting) foods has been known on
an industrial scale. An OOP example of this would be the Kentish hop
fields which provided seasonal income for a fair percentage of London's
poor in the nineteenth century (yeah, not exactly outside London but you
get the idea).

I think a better argument might be made for undocumented foods being
region-specific rather than the question of whether they're cultivated
or wild.  

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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