[Sca-cooks] Evidence for non-boiled medieval meat

[Stefan li Rous]

Selene Colfox commented:
> I would very much like this particular quotation and/or the book it's in,
> in order to justify servingroasted meats at SCA events to the folks who
> are getting a bit shirty that all our meats are not boiled.
>
> Shut them up with documentation and make the blackguards LEARN something!
My first thought on this is "You're kidding, right?". Perhaps you are mis-interpreting their comments. Perhaps they are referring to a specific culture or time.

But if not, I suspect I can find plenty of contrary evidence even in the
Florilegium.
1) I seem to remember that there is an illustration in the Bayeux Tapestry of
meat being grilled on metal grills.

2) Spits show up in a number of medieval illustrations. It's awlfully hard to
boil meat on a spit. The following is from my spits-msg file:

> Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 12:22:18 -0700
> From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
> Subject: Re: medieval cooking setup
>
> At 8:03 AM -0700 6/23/98, Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:
>>ok, heres the deal. We're doing 15th century re-creation. Not the SCA way
>>of picking bits of this and that from all over, but trying really really
>>hard to stick to 1470 Franco Flemish/Bruges...
>
> and asked about primary soiurces for cooking of that period.
>
> There is a picture in _Medieval Drawings_, M. W. Evans, Hamlyn Publishing
> Group Ltd., 1969, of an illustration of Uzziah entertaining Acchior and the
> elders to a banquet (from the Book of Judith), from Germany 1400-05.  There
> are six people in snazzy "modern" (ie, time of the illustrator) clothes
> sitting at a table outdoors on benches, with a tablecloth and fancy cups
> and serving dishes.  In the foreground, a man or boy in servant's clothing
> is holding one end of a long spit, straight except that his end has a maybe
> 6" section turned right-angle to the rest of it.  The far end of the spit
> is resting on a thick forked stick stuck in the ground; near that end under
> the spit is a fire (flames quite visible) with two chickens or something
> similar spitted over the fire.  A gentleman (to judge by his clothes) is
> poking the fire with a long stick.  The servant is sitting on the ground
> with the spit at almost the level of his shoulder, watching the chickens
> and presumably turning the spit; a serving dish sits on the ground next to
> him, presumably waiting for the chickens.  It is a neat picture, and has
> always suggested to me what Pennsic ought to look like if we could do it
> perfectly.
>
> Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook

In a later message:

> On that subject from Chiquart (_Du Fait de Cuisine_, 1420):
>
>   And one should definitely not trust wooden spits, because they will
> rot and you could lose all your meat, but you should have one hundred
> and twenty iron spits which are strong and are thirteen feet in
> length; and there should be other spits, three dozen which are of the
> aforesaid length but not so thick, to roast poultry, little piglets,
> and river fowl. And also, four dozen little spits to do endoring and
> act as skewers.
>
> Elizabeth/Betty Cook

3) There are quite a number of roast meat recipes in medieval collections.
Often the meat is boiled but then roasted. Sometimes in the reverse order, or
at least roasted and then braised.