SC - juniper berries - long

[Par Leijonhufvud]

Ras said:
> CBlackwill at aol.com writes:
> << One quick question:  Does anyone on the list have any references to how 
>  medieval cooks kept things cold, since the invention of the refrigerator was 
>  not to come about for many, many, many years?   >>
> 
> Although I don't have the references immediately handy, ice houses were 
> common throughout the middle east during period. They were also common 
> throughout the Western world until the invention of refrigeration. Ice blocks 
> are simply cut out of lakes and ponds in the winter and stored in ice houses 
> in saw dust, etc., throughout the year. Such blocks literally keep for months 
> before melting. I think that Food in History or The History of Food has a 
> segment dealing with this subject. Any large manor house would have had its 
> ice house and commercial ice houses also existed.

Icehouses, common? In Europe? I very much would like to see what
referances 
you have for this. While there are records of the Romans and various Middle
Easterners using ice houses, the art seems to have been lost in Europe until
the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Elizabeth David in "Harvest of the
Cold Months" says on page xiii, "the earliest modern documentation of
the ice
trade in Italy dates from the fifteenth century." Though she does say
"Much of the early ice gathering was on a small scale, as people gathered
ice from ponds and stored it in pits". From her later comments on ice
houses, it looks like most of these were built in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and even then were considered curiousities, worth
writing about. She does mention an 13th century ice house has been
excavated at Vauclaire Abbey in Aisne.

So the evidence for the use of ice houses looks patchy. And the earlier
ones appear more to be unlined pits in the ground. Also they seem to have
been used to store ice for later use in drinks and such and not used for
cooling foods as they were pits into which the ice was packed and insulated
in straw and earth, without provision for space for other items or easy
access.

- -- 
Lord 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 ****