SC - Haggis and Strawberries

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Lee-Gwen Booth wrote:
> 
> I was having a discussion with a (non-cook) SCA friend and she mentioned
> that she felt that Haggis would have only been a peasant dish in period (her
> grandparents were Scottish and she says they never ate Haggis partly for
> this reason).

The prejudice about offal being a food for the poor is comparatively
modern, and haggis has, as far as I know, always been considered a
rather festive dish (think, even in modern terms, of its presentation,
flamed with whisky, accompanied by pipes, etc.). This is compounded by
the fact that haggis has traditionally been made with the innards of
fresh venison about as often as with those of sheep. You could argue
that the shift in the socio-economic status of the dish occurred when
sheep farming became considered less of an occupation for the
well-to-do, but the fact is that there are several haggis recipes (some
resembling modern recipes made with offal, fat, and some kind of grain
or starch product, some not) in the known English medieval and
renaissance recipe sources. These sources pretty much have to be viewed
as either A) specifically aimed at the noble and/or the wealthy, or B)
hand-copied or printed books that were expensive until the seventeenth
century or so, in which case, see A) above.
 
> As well, while this friend is not an authenticity freak on any level, we
> were discussing what foodstuffs could ruin the feel of a feast - I said the
> bright red vegetables (capsicum, tomato), potato (although, in a soup, it is
> at least a bit hidden), chocolate.  She agreed with this list and added big,
> red strawberries because she had heard that strawberries as we know them are
> more a New World food and that the ones people in Europe would have been
> eating would have been the small wild strawberries.
> 
> Any opinions (particularly backed up with documentation!)?

The modern western Big Fat Strawberry, or Strawberrica Insipida (yes,
it's true, I forget the name and I made this one up) is, I believe, a
hybrid of a small European variety and a Chilean variety, so yes, it is
presumably a New World, and in fact, even distinctly modern, food.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com