SC - I am So Ashamed! (long)

[Bonne of Traquair]

Several have asked why Rose is so ashamed. I went though the article with my 
pitiful bit of knowledge to produce a review of it.

>The following article ran in this morning's Santa Cruz Sentinel. October 
>25, 2000
>Wicca cookbook offers the basics, with a twist
>By NANCY REDWINE
>sentinel staff writer

>The Middle Ages are not exactly considered a time of high culinary
>achievement.

Depends on who you ask, and nobody asked us. We are well aware of the high 
degree of culinary acheivement that exists.

>The Medieval kitchen was blurred with smoke, hung with smelly
>carcasses and populated with goats and chickens.

This situation certainly could and proably did exist, but there's no reason 
to beleive it was the standard.

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.

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.

>
>Combining a gentle introduction to Wicca, the history of Medieval cooking
>and eating, with a solar-calendar-based collection of recipes - ancient and
>modern - "The Wicca Cookbook: Recipes, Ritual and Lore" weaves a convincing
>case for looking at the wisdom - culinary and spiritual - of that formative
>period of human history.
>

Someone else mentioned that poor punctuation above can mis-lead one into 
'learning' that Wicca is the history of Medieval cooking and eating.

>After a full moon ritual to bring her writing work, author Wood received a
>phone call from her former boss, a literary agent who knew of an editor
>looking for an author for a Wiccan cookbook.

Ooops! when I first quickly read the article, I mistakenly 'read' that the 
author was asked to write a medieval cookbook since the reviewer introduced 
the idea of this book being about medieval food.  Such is the power of 
suggestion. In re-reading this, I see I mis-read the paragraph. I now doubt 
the book itself presents the food as medieval, the reviewer was just looking 
for a 'hook'.

>
>Despite some serious hygiene and food preservation problems in the Middle
>Ages,

Hygiene and preservation problems from a modern perspective, but they did 
have rules and expectations. Some documents we have stress the importance of 
clean cooks, kitchens, cookware and ingredients, including water.

Their preservation techniques worked reliably enough to still be in use 
today (drying, sugaring, fermenting, salting, pickling, and storing fresh 
and preserved foods in cold, dark, dry places). Others worked less well 
(filling the meat pie up with butter to seal it) but worked well enough to 
continue in use until the idea and technology of canning could finally be 
figured out.

>Wood and Seefeldt highlight its positive contributions to modern
>cooking,
>such as the intricacies of spices and herbs (often used to hide the
>taste of bad meat).

This is a fallacy we are constantly battling.  It might hide the taste of 
meat that was gamey or tainted but rotten meat was rotten and would make you 
just as ill then as now.  A cook that attempted to hide the fact the meat 
was rotten by spicing over it would be in serious trouble when someone in 
the household died.

This is personal experience that I'd like to research better:  a co-workers 
elderly father-in-law called meat that was adrenalin drenched from the 
animal having been 'run' before it's death 'taint' meat.  For this reason, 
his venison recipe used acid (orange juice) and spices (hot pepper flakes, 
black pepper, plenty of salt) to counteract the taint flavor.  I don't know 
where the idea that they ate bad mead came from.  Since hearing of Mr. 
Richardson, I've always wondered if someone translated a word meaning 'meat 
with the taste of having been run' in say, middle ages french, into 
'tainted' when writing it up in more modern english and that was the 
beginning of this 'fact'.

Also, meat that isn't at it's very best is not at all the same as meat that 
is 'rotten'. It's not uncommon yet for those that can't afford to be prim 
about it to simply wash the blood from meat that has a smell if you sniff it 
from close range, and serve it well cooked in a strongly sauce. (Says Bonne, 
shopper of marked down for final sale bins.)

There was some research out in the last year or two indicating that spices 
such as cinnamon have preservative properties, meaning cooks of that time 
may have been adding preservative qualities to their cooked dishes via 
spices even if they didn't realize it.

(And see below for the volume of fresh meat that makes this idea of bad meat 
being served seem less likely.)

>Surviving the Middle Ages are dishes such as Frumenty, a bulgur dish 
>favored
>by lords and clerics

Frumenty is made from wheat, I thought.  But I can certainly be incompletely 
informed on the topic.

>and Mead, which is credited with bringing oblivion to
>many a pagan.

We can concede this!  Many an SCA member too.

>Tamales de Martinez (from Wood's great-grandmother) comes from
>a tradition that predates the Middle Ages, but belongs right in the middle
>of this celebration of indigenous roots.

someone asked about this.  Whatever peoples were in central/south america 
could have been eating a dish consisting of corn porridge wrapped around a 
filling, covered with corn husk and steamed.  Doesn't seem unlikely.  Anyone 
know for sure?  There was a thread about a book on Mayan foods wasn't there? 
  I was deleting like mad to keep the volume under control and didn't read 
that thread.

OTOH, it could be a simple typo and she intended to write "postdated the 
Middle Ages".


>"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.

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.

As to the timing of animal slaughter and liklihood of meat spoiling before 
it could be eaten:  People assume that meat was only slaughtered when it was 
late enough in the year that the option of forage was gone, that fodder was 
limited, and the weather was cold enough to allow time for preserving 
processes to be undertaken before spoilage could start. This is certainly 
how things worked on modern small family farms, but I'm not sure that the 
more communal arrangements of medieval manor and village dictate the same 
problems and solutions. If you think through their situation and needs 
completely instead of assuming it agreed with the needs of modern small 
family farms, I think you'll come to different conclusions.

The situation: Between the immediate and extended family, guests, servants 
and the expectation of largesse after important feasts, even a small manor 
might be feeding 30-50 people people on any meat day and at the regular 
holidays. Larger households might have 10 times that.  Meat days occur 
several times a week, and feast days regularly, possibly one minor one per 
month, plus the real biggies at Easter and 12th night. Then there's weddings 
and other special occaisions. With these numbers of people and meat meals, I 
don't see a problem with slaughtering animals on a regular basis from Easter 
through 12th night, which brings us almost back to the beginning of the 
Lenten fast in the dead of winter.

We know that they plan for fall and winter in other ways, bringing roots to 
the cellars and hams to the chimneys, why do we assume they cannot plan to 
have fresh meat nearly until Lent disallows it? Unless there have been 
problems producing fodder in the summer, the plans for winter fodder can be 
made to allow for some animals to be kept part of the winter, some longer, 
some until 12th night, and some few until a late January feast day. Finally 
Ash Wednesday arrives, usually in February, and there are only the cows, 
ewes, sows and the few male animals needed for next years breeding that must 
be fed until the pastures are green again.

The proof of this is in stewards records and feast menues, and someday I 
should like to research it and write it up.

>Porridge was most common.

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.

>"Wicca stresses the importance of thinking about what you're trying to
>accomplish," Wood said. "What I find remarkable about its application to
>cooking is that it makes it OK to be completely immersed in what you're
>doing. It's not really about doing something you wouldn't already be doing,
>but about being absolutely aware of what you are doing."

Many of us can appreciate this statement.

>
>All of the following recipes are from the Samhain section of the cookbook.
>In Wiccan tradition, it is the Witches' New Year, the time when the veils
>between worlds are thin, and the time of the final harvest. Traditional
>foods eaten this time of year are pumpkins, pomegranates, apples, squash,
>beets, and hazelnuts.
>

So why aren't we presented with recipes for these (other than the one for 
apples)?  If the books focus is medival cooking, as the article seems to 
suggest, then the recipes included are far from medieval. I can concede the 
baking powder being used so that the scones and cookies have a texture that 
people expect. But the idea of putting fresh fruit into a bread is not 
anything I know of documentation for and the chocolate in the cookies is 
just not medieval. The chicken stew falls into what we'd call 'peri-oid'.  
All the ingredients are plausible, but is there an actual reference to a 
chicken and barley stew?

>APPLE SCONES
>
>1 med.-sized apple
>2 cups flour
>3 tsp. baking powder
>2 Tbsp. sugar
>* tsp. ground cinnamon
>* tsp. salt
>6 Tbsp. vegetable shortening
>* cup raisins
>* cup apple juice
>
>CHICKEN-BARLEY STEW WITH HERBS
>
>2 Tbsp. butter
>2 cups thickly cut green onions, white and green parts
>4 cloves garlic, minced
>2 to 3 lbs. chicken breast, on the bone
>* cup barley
>3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
>3* cups water
>2 bay leaves
>2 Tbsp. minced fresh sage
>
>ALL HALLOWS' EVE CAKES
>* cup vegetable oil
>4 ozs. unsweetened baking chocolate, melted
>2 cups granulated sugar
>4 lg. eggs
>2 tsp. vanilla extract
>2 cups sifted cake flour
>2 tsp. baking powder
>* tsp. salt
>1 cup confectioners' sugar
>
>"The Wicca Cookbook: Recipes, Ritual and Lore" by Jamie Wood and Tara
>Seefeldt is published by Celestial Arts/Ten Speed Press in Berkeley.

After this slow re-reading of the review, it seems that the book  might not 
have any focus on medieval food, though since it skirts around the topic, it 
might have a few standard mistakes. I can't really tell if those in the 
reveiw are from the book or the reviewer. But I can be sorry that the same 
tired mis-information has been placed before the public again.

Bonne

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