[Sca-cooks] Summer is Here

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sunday, June 29, 2003, at 12:12  AM, Sue Clemenger wrote:

> Maire, again.
> I'm wondering (since I'm thinking of the summer/hot weather foods for 
> my
> article) if medieval cooks, when considering the various humoral 
> aspects
> of the foods they were cooking with, had seasonal variations.  Did 
> they,
> for instance, recommend cool/wet things during hot days?  I've sure
> noticed, over the years in modern America, that my diet preferences 
> vary
> greatly with the seasons, and it really doesn't have much to do with
> food availability.  There are specific things I seem to intuitively
> "crave" depending on the season....
> Does this happen to anyone else, or am I completely weird about it? ;-D
> --maire, rambling on a hot saturday night, while she has a glass of
> rhubarb wine....

There are a couple of dishes recommended as being specifically 
appropriate for summer (which I now cannot think of, of course). For 
some reason, right or wrong, I STR these involving cold meats, 
typically involving vinegar and parsley. Which also occur in that 
15th-century English dish of boiled perch, served cold (possibly 
deboned, but the language is not perfectly clear on that -- it says 
something about lifting hem up, or some such, which is pretty vague -- 
it could refer to draining the fish from its cooking liquor or lifting 
the meat off the spine, among other possibilities).

Offhand I'm not sure about the specific role of parsley, but it seems 
to me that boiling a fish (a cool and moist food, made more so by 
boiling), and then served cold, with vinegar (further cooling and 
moistening it) as a summer dish (for the hot, dry months) is a pretty 
clear statement on humoral medicine.

Let's see. Where's my copy of all those Tacuina Sanitatis?

Adamantius