[Sca-cooks] Tips on Redactions

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

If you're looking for information on what people were buying...

Depending on what time period you are looking at, there are extant
household accounts that have been published. C. M. Woolgar published two
volumes of just household accounts, at least one of which is out of
print.  Still in print is his _The Great Household in Late Medieval
England_. Christopher Dyer has a certain amount of this information in
_Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages_, as well.

Look, it's a Dyer reference! And no, my copy is not in my briefcase. ;-)

Other accounts can be found as well, but off the top of my head I'm not
remembering the titles. There's the various Assizes of Bread and other
regulations that tell us what unscrupulous merchants were willing to do to
foodstuffs to earn a quick shilling.

Maintenance agreements (also cited by Dyer) mention raw materials, and
various tenant-related documents mention food rents. Literature sometimes
(as we've mentioned, Chaucer and Shakespeare are big ones for this) has
mention of foodstuffs, prepared or otherwise.

Lastly, medical treatises suggest preparation and sometimes seasoning.


Margaret (who has many more books than she has time to read them)



> What are some of the other references we have, outside of the cookbooks?
> Did some Paston write "And for a miracle, he didn't cook the meat to
> dishrags, but it came to the table a nice pink throughout"? Or,
> conversely, "I don't know why this cook never bothers to roast the meat
> through!"  (The Pastons were quite capable of writing things like that,
> they're a wonderful source... nice and chatty.) And if so, how do we
> know what are individual preferences as opposed to standards? (My
> parents had totally different ideas of what a cooked steak looked like.
> Mom used to search the meat counter for the misfit that had been cut
> lopsided! But, of course, they agreed on pork chops.)
>
> Some, I understand. If people keep buying things, they are probably
> eating them. But where does one find that information? If I, as someone
> totally inexperienced in this, want to start trying these out, what do I
> need to know outside the recipes and where do I start looking?
>
> (And, if anyone thinks I am asking questions to avoid straightening my
> kitchen and defrosting the freezer, which I need to do before I start
> really cooking, they might be right...)
>
> Anne
>