[Sca-cooks] period breakfasts

[Pixel, Queen of Cats]

Somewhere in amongst my books, there is a mention of breakfast for the
king and for the children. It included loaves of manchet, wine, and, IIRC,
either fish or meat. I don't remember if it was specified to be leftover
meat, or not, though.

The Church encouraged two meals a day on regular days and one on fast
days, on religious grounds, rather than the three we moderns are used to.
The theory was that three meals was catering to the physical, sensual side
and thus a Bad Thing. IIRC, you were also supposed to wait to eat
breakfast until you'd prayed and been to church and possibly done some
work, but lots of people ignored that theory.

Frequently the supper leftovers (my family is from farming stock, dinner
is what you eat at noon) were eaten later at night, in a meal called
reresoper (another custom the clergy took umbrage at). At least according
to my info.

There are some lovely period recipes that are not, strictly speaking,
*breakfast* recipes per se, but they look awfully like things that we eat
as breakfast these days. Frumenty, oatcakes, pain perdu, a lovely fruit-
filled french toast-y thing from Guter Spise, sawgeat (fried eggs and
sausage and sage), cryspes, fritters of various kinds, fruit purees,
custard tarts, fruit tarts, Digby's cheesecakes (which are really nice for
breakfast), and cuskynoles. [Yep, had to mention cuskynoles. ;-)]

Medieval humoral theory said that raw fruit was bad for you, but there is
enough writing about how bad it was to eat raw fruit to suggest that
sometimes people ate fruit raw. So, raw fruit is also a possibility,
although oranges and seedless grapes are OOP.

I'm not familiar with the ME corpus, but there are probably good breakfast
options in it as well.

Margaret FitzWilliam


On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Marion MacGregor wrote:

> Greetings,
> I was able to help out my friend with her salad dressing
> receipt thanks to everyone's response.  Thanks:)
>
> I do have a question and an opinion about breakfast served
> at events.  In period I have been lend to believe that
> "last night's dinner would have been breakfast the next
> day"  Would that be appropriate at an event? (if it is even
> true at all) Another thought I had is  the persons who
> would be running the breakfast board find it easier and
> more profitable to run it as a tavern?
>
> =====
> Nobility is not a birthright, it is defined by one's actions.
>