SC - chocolate cream - 1604

[Laura C. Minnick]

I mentioned in another message that the book "The Year 1000", footnotes
the section on period pigs not being particularly fat with the book
"A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink". It indicates page 97.
I believe this off somewhere, but my point to Ann Hagen's chapter on
pigs, which starts on page 102.

Here is a little bit from Anne Hagen's conclusion for that chapter:
"The pig is generally associated with the poorer classes, and most
households may have kept at least one pig although the pig does not
have the very poor/rural connotation of sheep. 193  However, they
were run in herds on the estates of the aristocracy, and in such
numbers that some must have been sold for meat. The will referring
to the funeral feast implies pork and bacon could be bought easily
abd that they were feast food. 194" ...

"Pigs would have been important to the Anglo-Saxons as a source of
essential fat. 197  How much of the carcass of a Dark Age pig was
fat can only be guesses at, though this may have been about 10-15%.
198" [Doesn't seem all that fat to me. Nor does it seem like such
an animal would be raised primarily for the fat/lard. - Stefan]
"For this reason fat pigs were particularly valued, as food rents
indicate, and this continued to be the case into the seventeenth
century...". [Yes, valued, but not the usual - Stefan]

"The fat in the meat would have provided calories, which would
otherwise have had to be derived from lean meat, nutritionally more
valuable as a source of protein." "The fat from pigs was used to
lard other roast and boiled meats and fish. 201"

"Because of it's high proportion of fat, pig meat was comparatively
easy to preserve, and was important because it could be preserved."

"Pigs were also valuable because they did not compete with man for
food, being fattened primarily on woodland or grass, rather than
grain. 202 They would be in better condition than other stock in
late winter since they could find natural forage, and may have been
useful for fresh meat at a time of year unfavorable for the slaughter
of rumiinants."

So while pigs might have sometimes been fattened with grain just
before market, it doesn't look like feeding grains to pigs at
least in England around the first millennium was common.
- -- 
THL Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****