[Sca-cooks] Camp Food)

[Nancy Kiel]

How to make a one pot meal for those who don't like their food even touching
on the plate, let alone being cooked together, from Dorothy Hartlry's Food
in England, first published 1954, the sixth edition pp 36-38: "The popular
idea that the huge cauldron cooked nothing but large joints of meat in a
swim of broth is wrong.  Deep, strong earthenware jars were filled and sunk
into the boiling water, puddings were wrapped in linen and suspended in it."
  She quotes no period sources for this information.  There is a diagram of
a cross-section of a medieval cauldron, showing a piece of bacon covered in
flour and water paste and wrapped in linen at the bottom of the pot; a
wooden board pierced with holes is placed on top of that; on the board
stands a jar packed with fowls resting upon a lubricating piece of suckling
pig and held down under their juice by heavy stones, or hard boiled eggs;
another jar holds a piece of beef resting on birch twigs (so it doesn't
stick) and the lid is sealed with paste and tied down with plastered linen
[i.e. a pressure cooker].  Hanging from the handle are an oatmeal pudding
and a bag of beans.
As I said, she gives no period sources.  I am familiar with 18th century
comments about boiling a pudding in a cloth in the pot were you are boiling
meat, but not with preparing a whole meal.  I would think that a person who
was willing to eat all boiled food probably wouldn't care if they were
cooked separately or not.  Throwing everything in the pot would be much
easier that all these jars.  Take this information for what it's worth.



Nancy Kiel
nancy_kiel at hotmail.com
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.   Emerson


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