[Sca-cooks] Generys' Feast/Rolls and butter

[Daniel Myers]

The use of butter apparently varied greatly from place to place.

The following notes were taken from the Florilegium - there's an awful
lot more.
[ http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/butter-msg.html ]

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 From the 13th-century Arabo-Andalusian "Manuscrito Anonimo", a chapter
entitled "The Customs that Many People Follow in Their Countries":
... Many people eat butter, and add it to bread, while others
cannot bear to smell it, much less to eat it....

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"I just read this a couple of weeks ago. I believe it was part of an
Englishman's
account of life in a Heugenot village in southern England, and it makes
a reference to certain alien habits of the folk of the village: among
them was the habit of giving the children bread smeared thickly with raw
butter in the Flemish fashion."  (Adamantius)

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Period serving manuals indicate that tables were set with large amounts
of bread completely apart from trenchers, and that bread was always on
the table with cheese and fruit before the first course arrived. This
would tend to go against your contention. There are recipes for sops,
but they are not all that common; and while it is highly probable that
bread was dipped in other broths and sauces, we have no evidence
that it was *only* used so, and considerable reason to doubt it. On
the other hand, the same serving manuals make no mention of putting
butter on the table (or olive oil); which suggests that neither was it
spread with substances of that kind, at least much of the time.

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There are at least six recipes for almond butter extant from the 14th
and
15th centuries in England. However, there is no evidence that it was
used
as a spread. It seems to have been served sliced as a dish.



On Wednesday, September 25, 2002, at 10:41 AM, Sue Clemenger wrote:

> I dunno...there are a number of recipes for "flatbread" (usually in the
> context of creating something multi-layered and sweet, so it's hard to
> say if it's more of what we'd consider a pastry, or a crepe, or the
> "flatbread" it always seems to be translated to), and some of them use
> oil. I *think* those are usually ones that are clearly unleavened,
> though (the stuff's at work, so I'd have to check there).
> --maire
>
> "Decker, Terry D." wrote:
>>
>> It is probably a condiment.  Most of the modern Moorish breads don't
>> seem to
>> use fat in the making and the addition of fat to bread dough appears
>> to be
>> something that is retained after it occurs.  And as with most of the
>> European sources, it is hard to tell how wide-spread the use of
>> butter as a
>> condiment was.
>>
>> Interestingly, butter mixed with barley flour appears to have been a
>> common
>> condiment for bread in Ireland (not necessarily surprising given the
>> cattle
>> based economy and the fact the Irish still produce a prodigious
>> quantity of
>> butter and turn a nice profit smuggling it into Northern Ireland,
>> unless the
>> recent EU unification has put a crimp in the trade).
>>
>> Bear
>>
>>> I also ran across a mention, in one section of the Anon. Andalusian
>>> cookbook (I've been spending a lot of time in it lately),
>>> that refers to
>>> some people's custom of using butter with their bread, although I
>>> remember thinking that it was unclear (to me, at least) if that was a
>>> reference to butter-as-ingredient or butter-as-condiment.
>>> --Maire
>>>
>>> Terry Decker wrote:
>>>>
>>>> There is evidence of butter being used as a condiment for
>>> bread, but the
>>>> extent of use is difficult to determine.  Flavored butters appear in
>>>> Elizabethean writings.  Honey butter appears only as a medicine.

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