[Sca-cooks] Mrs Levy again

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach jenne at fiedlerfamily.net:
>When I looked at Western European medieval menus, I found a lot of
>fish dishes in the meat menus.

Oh, there are some, but I think there are more that don't feature
both than those that do. At least in my experience. YMMV.

>  Not RECIPES that mix meat and fish, though.
>Just menus. Enough to make me feel a bit wierd about doing fishless
>Western European medieval meals (though Dembinska claims that surviving
>meat menus from Poland didn't include fish).

Chiquart's approach is probably pretty common: if your feast includes
a fish day, you can adapt pretty much the entire menu for similar
dishes made of fish.

>I don't know if that was to accomodate those fasting, the way we serve
>vegetarian dishes, or what.

Again, Chiquart does specify that there will always be people who,
for whatever reason, do not eat meat, and that if they're important
enough to be invited to your feast, they're important enough to be
accomodated, even to the extent of allowing their personal cooks in
your kitchen, or giving them an allocated work space. I also STR that
it was either Chiquart's employer, as of the time he wrote Du Fait de
Cuisine, or the father, his previous employer, who had made a vow not
to eat meat until such-and-such a condition was fulfilled.

>I know I looked at other menus than those in Le Menagier but I'm not sure
>which ones.

Le Menagier actually is the one source I can think of, offhand, that
includes a dish of poultry with crayfish tails, the tile of meat.
There are others, I'm fairly certain, but I can't think of any just
now, OTTOMH.

Adamantius

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER