[Sca-cooks] SCA Slaughtering

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> Is the realism of slaughter and processing (and
> a lot more neatly done  than real mundane processing practices) just too much
> to expect to be acceptable, no matter how period the practice?

Well, here's a question: the cooking we re-create is cooking for the
nobility or upper middle class, since we are encouraged to rely almost
exclusively on recipe books for our information about what foods were
consumed.

Would the cooks of a noble or upper-middle-class household routinely start
with a live animal or or a dead one? In the case of game in particular,
wouldn't rabbits, stags, boars, etc be delivered to the kitchen already
dead and gutted but not skinned?

Would the cook routinely participate in the slaughtering process of
domestic animals in period, or just in the processing/cutting up? How
often would a cook in town send someone to a butcher to fetch a cut of
meat or a big piece of dead animal? I would assume that
chicken-slaughtering, in particular, would be done by cooking staff-- but
would cooks kill their own piglets, pigs, veal calves, cows, rabbits,
goats, lambs and sheep, or would other staff accomplish these tasks while
cooking and/or butchering staff, did the actual cutting up? Also, what
about animals whose skins were processed by tannery? Would the cooks do
the skinning there, or would someone else do the skinning?


-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa   jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken
places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and
the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these
you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
-- E. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms