[Sca-cooks] SCA Slaughtering

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> You're thinking of a large household, probably royal, certainly of fairly
> high title and a great amount of wealth. What you're saying would be true
> for households of that type.

Nope. Look at the records. We're talking about small manor houses having
family and staff combined over 20 or 25 people.

> BUT, and this is a major BUT, in any given area there would be few of those
> sorts of households. In period, your average noble was essentially a farmer
> with sovereignty over his lands and people. Certainly, he could raise levees
> and be called to War, but in the main his job was to oversee the production
> of goods from his lands.

Yes, this is the size manor (and up) and  staff I'm talking about.
You're not talking about a family and 4 servants.

In the ordinary course of events, those people with
> specific tasks, such as working with the falcons or the dogs, or herding, or
> whatever would be responsible for those tasks. In an extraordinary event,
> such as the harvest, or the fall butchering, or perhaps the necessity to
> entertain a Royal Progress, then everybody was expected to pitch in and do
> what needed to be done on their level.Certainly, for example, the household
> scribe would not be asked to slaughter the pigs, but he might be put to
> keeping a record of how many were slaughtered, and how many hams were
> smoked, and that sort of thing.

What I'm asking here is if the _COOK_ would have been doing the actual
_slaughtering_, as opposed to butchering and preserving.

Harvest and haying are special cases, as you know, since there is only a
small window of opportunity for taking care of those chores.

> I can't imagine that the Lady of the house was ignorant of the details of
> the food prep, since it was her job to oversee all the household servants,

I would think that slaughtering would be supervised by the Lord, Esquire
or Steward (or the man of the house) not the Lady.

Certainly, records show that a small portion of the butchers' guild
members were  women in the cities, and of course the butcher's wife would
participate in the craft, though whether that would be in slaughtering
process or the butchering process, I wouldn't know.

> And that thought train is why I feel that any major project in a household
> involved everyone's participation- not much differently from the ways things
> are done today.

My impression from looking at scholarly sources as well as manuals
describing job descriptions runs contrary to that, but I'm going to return
to my sources again and see what they say.

-- 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