[Sca-cooks] Seeking Improvement

[Philip & Susan Troy]

bill mayfield wrote:


>  GrrrrrrrrrrrrGrrrrrrrrrrGrrrrrrrrrrrrr
>   I greatly dislike when a freakin Laurel
>  REFUSES to hear that they may be wrong and
>   dismisses me as an "unskilled and poorly read apprentice"
>  makes one want to behave badly........and not in a good way
>
>   *DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP Breath*
>
> sorry  :~(        (vent off)
>
>   According to the More skilled and vastily superior Laurel
>    person the only sugar available to the noble households
>   of the 12-14th century were Date and Beet Sugars,my unskilled
>   and poorly read self believe that cane sugar was available
>    to them,mostly as a "medicinal" yet also in food-stuffs
>   preperation.
>  May I ask for suggestons on where to find documentation
>   on Cane sugar,if it was used,and how was used in Medieval cookery.

Waitaminnit. Is this _your_ freakin Laurel, or _a_ freakin Laurel?


Me, I'm usually described in other effing terms not normally reproduced
on this list, as in, "arrogant bastige effin' Laurel".

Now, if this is _your_ Laurel, then I can only say he or she is
absolutely right! (And we'll talk later.)

If it is simply _a_ Laurel, then I can safely say that thass pure hooey.

First of all, the process for refining sugar from sugar beets is, I
believe, eighteenth century (see Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking"
for details, something you should do anyway just because), and medieval
cooks would have had no access to it. Date sugar, while it might have
been available, is not, so far as I know (and arrogant bastige though I
may be, I certainly don't know everything), as highly processed as other
forms of sugar; what I've seen is basically dried date juice syrup or
even pulp in crystallized form. It contains sugar, but strictly
speaking, is not, in itself, sugar.

Second, cane sugar was known to the Romans, Pliny speaks of it in his
"Historia Naturalis": something about honey from a reed, without bees,
found in the far eastern lands. No, Phlip, he did not mean cattails...

Third, I'm not up to a word count from various sources at the moment,
but if you look at, for example, The Forme of Cury, and even its earlier
precedents, such as those Two Anglo-Norman Culinary Manuthingies, at
least one of which appears to be 13th century, there are plenty of
references to sugar. And this is just in England. True, you often find
sugar used in combination with honey in these sources, because it was
expensive, but use it they did. Maitre Chiquart d'Amiczo, writing in the
early fifteenth century, speaks in an offhand way of procuring pounds
and pounds of both sugar, candied spices, candied nuts, and even sugar
balls wrapped in silver and gold leaf, IIRC, to be used both as
decorations and for, essentially, digestive purposes, in his Du Fait de
Cuisine.

In, what, the fifteenth century or so, you find that Europeans had new
access to cane sugar grown in new places, such as Cyprus and even in the
new world, I believe, so you'll see a developing trend of sugar
replacing honey in a lot of recipes.


Oh, and I would check any of the several illustrated Tacuinum Sanitatis
(books on health) for pictures of people cutting sugarcane in the
fourteenth century.

Summation: while there isn't a huge lot of evidence for sugar use in the
Early Middle/Dark Ages, it was known by the Romans and would have been
available to noble households in Europe, probably beginning in earnest
after the First Crusade, if not before. Recipe evidence for sugar which
was clearly neither honey nor beet sugar, although by remote stretches
could be date sugar, if highly unlikely, begins to be found in English
sources as of the twelfth century with Alexander Neckham, and increases
in frequency thereafter.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98