[Sca-cooks] Rice question

[Daniel Myers]

On Friday, August 30, 2002, at 02:33 PM, Pixel, Goddess and Queen wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Daniel Myers wrote:
>> Is there any information as to the types of rice available in northern
>> Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries?  (i.e. white rice vs. brown,
>> long grain vs. short, etc...)
>>
>> When trying the Rys (Rice in Almond Milk) recipe[1] I used brown rice,
>> and while it turned out quite well, the character of the dish would be
>> changed completely with white rice.
>>
>
> Completely off the top of my head, I remember reading that polished
> white
> rice was what medieval Europe was importing. Certainly there are a
> number
> of dishes that are supposed to be white, that use rice or rice flour,
> that
> would not be white if unpolished brown rice was used. There should be
> at
> least one pottage in the Anglo-Norman corpus that contains rice and
> specifies the color to be white.
>
> I have no idea as to what variety would be correct--I myself prefer
> long
> grain, so that is what I use.

Is there any more direct documentation?  What worries me about this
sort of interpretation is that there is a great latitude between the
word people use to describe color and the actual color (e.g. the terms
in English to describe the color of people's skin).

In other words, I wouldn't be surprised to find a beige colored pottage
was referred to as being "white" because it didn't include an
ingredient that would make it another color ... say it lacked the usual
parsley to make it "green".


--
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  Edouard Halidai  (Daniel Myers)
  http://www.medievalcookery.com/
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