[Sca-cooks] Butter? Lard? Tallow?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>Greetings:
>
>Our local cooking list is having a discussion of the meaning in 16th 
>c. Spanish of "manteca de vaca". It was given in a recipe as 
>"butter", which is how i've seen it translated. But some listees 
>think it means "cow lard" and thus means "tallow".
>
>It appears that in Modern Spanish "manteca" means butter, "tallow" 
>is "sebo", and "lard" is "manteca de cerdo", but i don't assume that 
>what is true today is the same as it was 400 plus years ago.
>
>As i am not a specialist in Renaissance Spanish, could some listees 
>who have dealt with Renaissance Spanish please comment?

I'm not really qualified as a student of the language in question, 
but I think in period French lard doesn't refer to the rendered fat 
we generally associate with that term today; it would be fat pork or 
bacon. I mention this only because there's a possibility that if 
manteca is a cognate of lard (I don't know there's a relationship; 
I'm saying "if"), there's the chance it could be suet rather than 
tallow.

Adamantius
-- 






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If they have no bread, you have to say, let them eat 
brioche."
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782

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