[Sca-cooks] Butter

[Decker, Terry D.]

> <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US> writes:
> >About a year ago, we were discussing whether butter should be served
> >at feasts and Gunthar chided me about serving butter at the
> >Protectorate feast without documentation.
>
>     From *Women In Old Norse Society* by Jenny Jochens
> (Cornell U. Press,
> Ithaca, 1995.  ISBN 0-8014-3165-4)
>
<clipped>
>      Dr. Jochens has based her study mostly on literary sources.
>
>      Elizabeth

Thank you.  I'll add these to my notes, although they would not have helped
with the rules I was playing under for the Protectorate feast.

Nanna Rognvaldardottir provided documentation of the use of butter in
Viking-era Scandinavia and there is documentation of butter and spreads made
from butter being used in Ireland.  There is also some just post
Elizabethean information from Hugh Plat about washed butters.

These represent fringe elements, either geographically or temporally, of the
Medieval and Renaissance world.  We could not find evidence of butter being
used in mainstream Europe during most of the SCA period.  The quote from
Urbanus magnus helps fill in that gap.

The rules I set for the Protectorate feast were: 1) the feast is to be an
Elizabethean feast, 2) the recipes must be documentable to the Tudor,
Elizabethean or Jacobean periods, 3) I must be able to explain any problems
of documentation and any variances which occurred, and 4) I could not vary
from the ingredients I placed in my posted ingredient list (primarily to
prevent allergic reactions, rather than as a rule of the game).

The Plat reference appeared after the feast, thus the butter was a variance
I had not explained in the handout.  So it was an error, mea culpa.  While
Plat tells me something about the butter served, he doesn't say much about
how it was eaten, which is why I found the comments on butter in the
translation of a Medieval treatise on table manners so interesting.

Thanks again,

Bear