[Sca-cooks] OT - A little history

[Decker, Terry D.]

> jeanne at atasteofcreole.com writes:
> 
> > Some are blatantly wrong, but it's still good fun reading!
> > 
> 
> SOME of them??? Try all of them.  This list of "historical 
> facts" is so bad 
> it's on the Snopes Urban Legend website...
> 
> Brangwayna Morgan

So what about the problems in the Snopes response?

I can raise questions about the origin of the word threshold, but the two
that really pop out are both food related.


----Original text-----
If you had money your plates were made out of pewter. Sometimes some of
their food had a high acid content and some of the lead would leach out into
the food. They really noticed it happened with tomatoes. So they stopped
eating tomatoes, for 400 years. 


-----Snopes response------
Tomatoes were native to South America and, as such, weren't introduced to
Britain until the 19th century - those living in 16th century Britain had no
knowledge of this foodstuff. By the way, tomatoes were not all that popular
in America until the 19th century because they're of the nightshade family,
and many assumed this foodstuff must also be poisonous. 


*****Bear's comments*********
If tomatoes weren't introduced into England until the 19th Century, why do
they show up in Gerard's Herball, along with a southern European recipe?  No
knowledge of the tomato, indeed!

There are a number of European references to tomatoes from the 16th and 17th
Centuries, which clearly demonstrate that Europeans, and the English in
particular, knew of the tomato.  There are some recipes which suggest they
were eaten.  The correct statement should be there is no evidence of
wide-spread use as a foodstuff until the 19th Century.



----Original text-----
Most people didn't have pewter plates though, they all had trenchers, that
was a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl.

-----Snopes response------ 
Trencher is a medieval word that comes from the French trancher, "to slice,"
which shouldn't seem all the remarkable when viewed in the light of the
earliest ones being made from sliced bread and used at banquets to receive
morsels taken from a central dish and for soaking up any dripping sauces.
Food that needed to be pierced or cut was not placed on a bread trencher.
Trenchers started to receive pewter or wooden underplaques (also called
trenchers) in the 14th century. Though these underplaques were sometimes
used as plates to eat from, by custom the more common use called upon them
to support a bread platform for food until sometime in the 16th century. 


*****Bear's comments*********

The problem with these two pieces is "who and when."  Who used wooden or
metal trenchers and when did they use them.

The use of bread as a plate is an upper class practice.  Bread trenchers
seem to have been used only in wealthy households or lesser houses trying to
appear wealth (as witness the judicious use of trenchers in Menagier).  The
average person could not afford the quatity of bread required (I estimate
the cost at about 2 1/2s. per person per year), therefore the common folk
probably made do with bowls or wooden plates over the entire range of
centuries.

The evidence I have found suggests the bread trencher originates in France
in about the 10th Century and spreads in a band across northern Europe from
England to Poland. From the 13th to the 16th Century, bread trenchers moved
from regular use to use on formal occasions with the ritual of their
preparation and service becoming more elaborate.  By the 16th Century, bread
trenchers had mostly been supplanted by plates in most of Europe, although
they did appear at formal dinners for part of that century.  The Polish
court continued to use them on fast days into the 17th Century.. 
 
There is a painting of John of Gaunt (14th Century) at a "power dinner" with
rectangular, metal trenchers sans bread which tends to support my view
rather than the Snopes opinion.  I will admit that it is only one point of
evidence, and is not conclusive in itself.

BTW, "trancheor" appears to have been the Anglo-Norman word.  "Tailloir" is
the form more commonly adopted by languages other than English.

Bear