SC - Can medieval food be heart-smart?

[ChannonM@aol.com]

"Brian L. Rygg or Laura Barbee-Rygg" wrote:
> 
> Period foods are high in fat for a reason -- they needed the fat to survive
> in cold, drafty, pre-furnace houses.

Uh huh...

I recently had a conversation about this (actually connnected with the
question of whether pie crust was eaten; you'll see why in a sec) with a
SCAdian friend of mine, another laurel.

She told me that plague and famine went pretty much arm in arm during
parts of the fourteenth century (you can't work the fields because many
people are either sick or dead, and you can't eat because no one is
working the fields, so you're weak, so you get the plague etc. etc.) 

On top of this, she told me, harvests weren't great in the best of years
because of a "mini-ice-age" across Northern Europe through most of the
same century, resulting in a drop in the mean temperature. Not so much
weather changes as climate changes.

But this, of course, is the century and the context for our English
Royal recipes in which spoonfuls of rendered lard are stirred into
pottages to give them body, shine, and to keep them from clumping up or
getting hard as they cooled.

On the other hand, I don't know how much certain recipes would need to
be changed in substance, since quantities are largely guesswork anyway.

For example, it occurs to me that venison (especially braised venison
rather than roasted) with frumenty could be relatively heart-smart (am I
talking like a Californian yet?). Venison is quite a lean meat compared
to, say, prime or even choice beef, and most frumenty recipes involve
wheat (high fiber), broth (skimmed of most of the fat) saffron and egg
yolks (you can cook the frumenty a little longer to thicken it and use
fewer egg yolks and still be within the guidelines set by the recipe).

You could examine Lenten recipes: often almond milk will replace dairy
products with unsaturated fat, and not much of that, either. How many
almonds go into a platter of some of these foods for eight people? A cup
or so? Maybe less? 

I'd avoid some of the fish day recipes, though, as they seem to tend to
call for butter and cheese more, but there are several recipes for
boiled or poached lean fish in a fat-free sauce.

Think also about some of the skinned and redressed bird recipes: they at
least indicate that some poultry was roasted without its skin: you could
do the same. You could glaze them, as is mentioned in Sabina Welserin,
with egg whites with a little flour stirred in, perhaps with saffron
added, to keep some of the moisture in.

Overall, though, I'm a little leary of the philosophy that says that you
can't _ever_ eat anything bad for you. It limits the fun factor
severely, and I strongly suspect that this type of pseudoasceticism puts
as much stress on the heart as a two-pound Porterhouse steak. Personally
I'd rather have the steak than the stress, and my heart is in excellent
shape. Maybe not the rest of me, but... .

Adamantius  
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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