SC - fat consumption in period
Vincent Cuenca
bootkiller at hotmail.com
Thu Nov 30 21:23:43 PST 2000
To add on to Adamantius' comments on fats (I deleted the digest so I can't
quote directly):
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's "History of Food" cites regional preferences
for cooking fats. Lard was popular pretty much everywhere it was available,
but southern Europe preferred olive oil over butter. She cites several
accounts of Provencal and Catalan travelers bringing large supplies of oil
with them when they were forced to travel northward; there was an apparent
belief that eating butter caused leprosy. Of course, northern travelers in
Italy experienced the opposite reaction; they were sickened by the smell of
hot olive oil and pined for good northern butter.
Now, Mme. Toussaint-Samat has some pretty heavy Francophilic tendencies, and
she buys into the idea of half-rotten meat being popular in the Middle Ages,
so I'm not taking her quite at face value. Her scholarship does seem to be
pretty solid, though.
Vicente
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