[Sca-cooks] And they think _our_ beer tastes bad

[Elizabeth A Heckert]

On Sun, 02 Sep 2001 21:56:18 -0400 Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
writes:

>And they think _our_ beer tastes bad... from Reuters, via Netscape

>> LONDON (Reuters)
> The ale is brewed in clay pots with traces of
>baked animal droppings.

    Y'all, don't freak!  The newspaper guys got it *Way* wrong!!!
C'mon--we are talking modern media (grin!).  The key statement in the
article is the one above.  And sorry, apparently it was one of several
choices in the Dark Ages up until around the Norman invasion--in Britain
at least.

    They are NOT talking about brewing baked dung!!  To withstand the
temperature of a cooking fire, or a crucible, clay had to be tempered
with other things.  Sand, ground fired clay, shells and yes (bleah!) even
dung was used to make the clay better able to stand the heat of the fire.
 The tempering agent is added to the wet clay, and fired with the rest of
the pot.

     How do I know this?  I am trying to get ready for a late-ish Viking
era demo at the end of October.  I've got a few pieces made and drying
using *sand* and *ground clay* thank you very much as tempering agents.
If they survive the pit-fire process, I'll be using them and a leather
pot for camp cooking.

    There is an article on the web, by a Mr. Peter Beatson, of the New
Varangian Guard, a Viking re-enacting group out of New South Wales, on
pit-fired pottery of the Dark Ages.
<http://www.physics.mq.edu.au/~gnott/Miklagard/Articles/#Fig.1.

     To be fair to the poor journalist, tempering has a slippery
definition.  Some people include the ground clay (or grog) as a tempering
agent, and some do not.  Theophilus talks about grogging clay for
crucibles in *On Divers Arts*.  I assume--but I have not read it
specifically--that chemists and other such intelligent souls can analyse
the pottery and tell what it was made of.

    Honest, I bet it was the journalist, and the poor Skara Brae people
are muttering in their beer to-night!!

    Elizabeth

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