[Sca-cooks] Honey Butter? No! No!

[Stefan li Rous]

Serena da Riva commented:
> I have an aversion to serving butter of any kind because of it's prevalance.
>
> So, instead of butter I made a Orange Marmalade. I made it almost 4 weeks
> ahead of time and it kept in the fridge nicely.
>
> Nobody seemed to notice that there was no butter!

I'm not sure that orange marmalade is an improvement, at least as
far as authenticity goes.

Any particular area that this feast was for? Early or late in the
SCA time period?

Sweet oranges were very late in period. I can't remember when the
sour orange was introduced. However, either probably requires a
fair amount of sugar. Heavily sugared foods were not common earlier.

I earlier than the 14th Century I would go with something else. In
southern Europe, you might consider olive oil instead of butter. In
general butter was a northern Europe item while olive oil was more
common in the south. This caused some trouble within the Church
between the North and the South, since butter was resticted at times,
whereas olive oil wasn't.

For more on these, see:
butter-msg       (108K)  9/24/01    Period butter. Making butter. Butter churns.
fruit-citrus-msg  (45K)  3/26/01    Period citrus fruits. Recipes.
marmalades-msg    (55K)  1/12/01    Period marmalades and fruit jellies and jams
--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****