[Sca-cooks] No Sugar in 10th Century??

[Jenne Heise]

> I would not expect a scribe to eat the food addressed in the recipes or use
> a great deal of imported spices when cooking at home and, for the most part,
> I would expect much of the scribe's cooking to be done by female siblings,
> wives, SOs, or taverns.

I can think of three categories of scribes:
- Monks, whose acquaintance with cooking in their near past would have
involved institutional cooking (Medieval equivalent of Wood's Dining
Services)
- Clerks retained by land nobles, who would have eaten whatever was served
to the lower tables plus the leftovers passed down from the high tables
- 'Independent' craft scribes, such as worked in the scribal workshops
that produced the 'mass produced' medieval books of hours that could be
ordered from a shop. These indeed would have been fed by their wives or
their master's wives...

--
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at mail.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"It's no use trying to be clever-- we are all clever here; just try
to be kind -- a little kind." F.J. Foakes-Jackson