SC - I am So Ashamed! (long)

[Jenne Heise]

> Peasants might have had their live animals around their smokey hearth, but 
> I've been under the impression that there were outer and inner rooms, or 
> upper and lower rooms, or a pen and hut in order that animals and people be 
> separate.  They might have had their dead animals hanging in the rafters to 
> smoke rather than as fresh food storage and once they had chimneys, the 
> carcasses went there.

Interesting. Could you give me a citation for some books on this? 
 
> Cooks in castles had more space, and less liklihood of live or dead animals 
> being in the same room as food preparation. Sooner than peasants they would 
> have hearths with chimneys as well as less smokey charcoal braziers and 
> those nifty 'stoves' that had a hole for the pot to sit on with the fire in 
> a little hearth underneath, placed near a window for smoke to escape.

Hm. Also interesting. Do you have handy any book titles of books,
especially with pictures (artists impressions or whatnot)? I've been
puzzling over fried food for  a bit. 

> >"We know sketchily what peasants ate and cooked and it was a much simpler
> >diet. There were fewer, if any, spices, little meat except just after
> >harvest and usually chicken or pork. 
> Your honest to goodness dirt grubbing peasant wouldn't have spices except in 
> whatever largesse of leftover food the hall sent out. As the middle class 
> developed, more non-nobility had spices in larger amounts.

This one I need documentation for, because peasants could and did have
small amounts of negotiable cash in some places (ok, the one I now about
for sure is Silesia). I twould be sinfully extravagant, perhaps, but the
purchase of small quanitities of spices such as pepper wouldn't
necessarily be out of the range of possibility for someone who might be a 
'dirt-grubbing' farmer who sold his crop to pay his cash rent and had a
bit left over.
Furthermore, some things that were used for 'spices' (juniper berries, for
instance, and mustard), were locally produced.

> As to who ate what meats: Beef was considered coarse food suitable for 
> laborers, while chicken was more digestible and suitable for their masters. 
> Pork was generally popular from what I understand. Peasants could fish and 
> trap fowl (and rabbits?) and so could have those meats at any time. Hunting 
> larger game would be illegal, but not unheard of.

Ok, this is the party line on SCA-Cooks, but I wish someone would write up
all the documentary evidence they have, with footnotes to research
articles and menus. My impression is that, Platina's strictures to the
side, chicken was not the number-one most popular meat, and that both
mutton (y'all remember mutton, yes?) and beef were served with regularity.
Le Menagier de Paris's menus confirm that suspicion.

Also, in some places, trapping animals was against church law; in others
peasants got parts of the results of the hunt, and in some casescertain
peasants appear to have had more access to venison through legal
entitlements than many court people!

Foods that don't fall in the usual discussion are kid, goat, mutton,
coney, hare, and the wide variety of small birds. My feeling is that Le
Menagier at least liked Lagomorph meat as much as he liked poultry... In
England, peasants were forbideen to trap rabbits at one time, becuase they
were an imported animal, kept in special warrens by coneyers who worked
for landowners!

> This somewhat true for some times and places.  Porridge is easier and more 
> filling than raised bread or even flat breads. Not that some version of 
> bread was not available to peasants if they had the time and tools. They did 
> in some times and places.

Gruels and porridges seem to be under-represented in SCA feasting custom,
for obvious reasons. ;)
 
- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker