Sweetened Butter? (was Re: SC - Harvest Moon Shoot proposed menu)

[Decker, Terry D.]

Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Really?  I thought there were all these posh dishes using these 2 food items
> that the rich had their cooks prepare all the time.  Where did you get this
> information?
> Phillipa
> <<
>  Actually lobster was f ood for the poor or used as fertilizer, as were
>  oysters during the Colonial period right into the late Victorian period. >>

Which is one big reason why they're so scarce now that they're
considered luxuries. But as Phillipa states, there are indeed several
recipes for oysters (mostly pottages as I recall), and some for lobsters
(basic cooking and serving instructions, maybe not recipes per se) in
the medieval English and French corpus, and probably other cultures as well.

It's true that the luxury quotient of these foods has been variable, and
at times both foods have been, in various places, literally dirt cheap.
For example, throughout the nineteenth century taverns in New York City
used to either sell cheaply or give away oysters with their beers, wines
and spirits, the way many bars put out a bowl of peanuts or pretzels (or
whatever) today. I was reading [somewhere] just the other day about kids
in, I think, Newfoundland, being made fun of for bringing something so
gauche as a lobster sandwich to school, and this was within living memory.

On the other hand, none of this seemed ever to have stopped the rich
from eating them, and their cheapness, and consequent low regard by some
sectors of the populace, seems never to have been universal either
chronologically or geographically, probably because of the difficulties
of getting them to inland markets intact. 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com