[Sca-cooks] P things to put on bread?

[Alex Clark]

At 08:13 AM 2/17/2004 -0700, cailte wrote:

>--On Tuesday, February 17, 2004 9:23 AM -0500 a5foil 
><a5foil at ix.netcom.com> wrote
>>
>>Our experience is that if you have good sauces, and tell people in advance
>>to soak up the leftover sauce with the bread, you don't need anything else
>>to put on the bread.

Here's an old post (Wed Aug 25 23:18:20 CDT 1999 ) from the sca-kooks :-) 
archive:

>>>About the buttered bread reference:
>>>
>>>I´ve been trying to find an English translation of the saga of Hakon the Old
>>>(Haakon IV of Norway) - it is in the Flateyjarbók and written in the early
>>>14th century, IIRC, but have been unsuccessful so far. My own translation of
>>>the passage would be something like this:
>>>
>>>"At this time the frosts were so great that all their drink froze and the
>>>butter was so hard that the bread served to the king´s son couldn´t be
>>>buttered; he always wanted to be with the king´s court, and everyone liked
>>>him ... the king´s son was standing with the king´s men and was very cold.
>>>He saw that some of the men first took a bite of the bread, then of the
>>>butter. The boy took the butter and wrapped it in the bread ..."
>>>
>>>I´m not really sure how to interpret this but two things are clear to me: 1)
>>>the child´s bread was usually buttered 2) the adults were used to eat butter
>>>with their bread - maybe not _on_ it, that is not clear from this passage -
>>>but buttered bread was at least known to them.
>>>
>>>Then there is this in Reykdæla saga:
>>>
>>>"They ... found a man named Þorgeirr, who was called butter-ring. About him
>>>it is said that he preferred butter and bread above all other food."
>>>
>>>Same here - butter is eaten with bread but it is not quite clear if the
>>>bread is actually buttered.
>>>
>>>Nanna

So here is evidence of bread with butter (in an unknown configuration), and 
buttered bread, and the invention of the bread-and-butter sandwich.

. . .
>i find if bread is put out to appease, sending it whole and having people 
>break it slows them down (oddly as does dipping in oil--i suppose because 
>it makes them think about what they are doing).  pre-sliced or broken 
>bread and butter generates an automatic reflex to the (as the cooking 
>channel would say) the 'snack-jones gland'.

Another thing that might help is to serve cultured butter instead of 
sweet-cream butter. It might also be best to serve breads with character--I 
am under the impression that the plainest yeast breads in period were made 
with flour that was not pure white, but retained a fair bit of 
fine-textured bran and germ, and were leavened with ale-barm rather than 
active dry yeast. I've developed a preference for starting my yeast in a 
solution of water and malt syrup to approximate ale-barm, and proofing it 
until it makes a big head of foam.

Henry of Maldon/Alex Clark