[Sca-cooks] Peasant food - was Question to the group....

[johnna holloway]

Actually there are cookbooks that have peanut butter and jelly
sandwich recipes. Think about all the juvenile cookbooks that
show kids how to prepare fun foods. They start with the basic
pbj and then add the marshmallow cream, the chocolate chips, etc.
Also how many newspapers have reports on pbj sandwiches being
banned in classrooms today because of peanut allergies. And think
about the peanut marketing people that produce all those little
booklets that urge uses for peanuts and peanut butter. As long as
we still grow the product, there will be references to it in the
current literature, be it 500 years in the future or 1985. Food
literature is never just "cookbooks". It includes a full range of
materials from agriculture, medicine, nutrition, manufacturing,
botanical, zoological, etc. Then we get into the foodways, folklore,
religious, literary, etc. accounts.

Johnna Holloway Johnnae llyn Lewis

"Dunbar, Debra" wrote:

>  IMO I personally feel this way about historical food too.  For instance, I don't
> have any Peanut Butter and Jelly recipes in ANY of my cookbooks.  There may
> be a cookbook somewhere with it, but in 500 years, the odds are really
> stacked against any surviving cookbook having a recipe for PB&J. (And, we
> are a very literate society!)  Does that mean that in 500 years there will
> be people arguing whether people actually ate this mythical food?  Yeah,
> probably.  Anyway, on alleged "peasant" food, I use the PB&J example - if
> someone can show that the ingredients were commonly used in a similar
> fashion close to that time period, and/or close to that region, that they
> have several good secondary sources referring to it, and have other
> supporting evidence for their assumption, than I'll be willing to give it
> merit. Wrynne (who enjoys a big bowl of cabbage soup heavily loaded with pepper)