SC - Horrendous article about period food.

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/7/2000 5:47:51 PM Eastern Standard Time, Bluwlf17 at cs.com 
writes:

<<  I'm not that knowleged in period food, but the author of this article is 
refering to "plain peasants' fare".  I can beleive most of what they wrote, 
and agree about the 
 bread. >>

Peasants routinely brewed ale for their own use and for sale.  This is 
documented in the court rolls indicating that they were fined for not 
producing it at the proper quality level.  Brewing ale involves yeast, which 
can also be used to leaven bread, and produces ale barm, another leavening 
agent known and used in period.  Therefore I think it highly unlikely that 
peasants ate unleavened bread. Some of the food items which she says didn't 
exist did - such as spinach, pasta, and brussels sprouts.  Not all existing 
recipes are cooked to mush or ground to a paste.  And archaeological evidence 
shows that the teeth of medieval people were often in better shape then those 
of modern people, probably due to a lower level of sugar in the diet.

 <<Also, it is possible to cook bread on a hearth. Though some small 
 villages had community ovens, it was highly unlikly that anybody had a 
 suitable baking oven in their home. >>

I believe that there are instances in the court rolls of people being fined 
for keeping a bake oven in defiance of the lord.  This is because the lord 
provided use of a bake oven to his peasants, for which they paid a certain 
amount - sometimes money, sometimes a proportion of the bread or other items 
baked.  Someone keeping their own bake oven was breaking his monopoly.  It 
was, in towns, also possible to take your bread or pies to a commercial 
bakery and barter or pay for the use of the oven to bake them.  The author of 
the article says ovens didn't exist at all, not that peasants didn't have 
them in their houses.  That's a big difference.

People didn't eat off of a single wooden trencher at this time; trenchers 
were made of stale bread in most cases.  Wooden bowls were used, but there's 
no reason to believe that most peasant families had only one.  There are 
estate inventories surviving for peasants, and they usually show far more 
cooking and eating utensils than indicated in the article.  And the coroners' 
records show that people did wash both their hands and their food; they fell 
into the ditch or well or pond and drowned sometimes.

That's precisely the problem with this article - for someone who doesn't know 
much, or anything, about period food, the assertions in the article fit in 
nicely with pre-conceived notions that we have about how horrible life must 
have been in those days.

Brangwayna Morgan