SC - toys for tot feast

[Jenne Heise]

> We are supposed to be reenacting the Gentry and Royally of the Middle Ages,
> they would eat meat at tourneys, which is what we are recreating, I would
> never want to eat a feast of everyday people food, from Period, Gruel, stale
> bread, and the very occasional piece of fruit.

I don't think 'everyday people' such as merchants, craftsmen, etc. lived
on the starvation diet you describe. For one thing, everyone ate gruel
(which is just a name for a thin grain porridge) and the difference in the
bread was what it was made out of, not whether it was stale (stale bread
probably got used up in other recipes, not eaten). Poor people often ate
bread with rye, oats, barley, peas and beans in it; the rich generally ate
wheaten bread, and the merchant and artisan class somewhere in between.
Now if for some reason you think that the average person in the middle
ages was a beggar, you may be thinking of used trenchers as 'stale bread'

One would obviously tend to eat the fruit up when it was in season (which
means summer and fall) but vegetables such as greens were eaten by rich
and poor alike when they were in season; root vegetables such as turnips,
etc. were also eaten. Admittedly, some historians claim that it was
unfashionable at one point for the very rich to eat vegetables but I
regard them as suspect. 

For more information about food available to the non-nobility-- if by
everyday people that's what you mean-- is available in good books about
medieval food. Leave the SCAdian legends that carnivorous knights tell
alone.

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.

"They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the 
	nuts work loose. 
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when 
	they damn-well choose. " -Kipling, "The Sons of Martha"