[Sca-cooks] Source information for the make-up of removes?

[Stefan li Rous]

Mari asked:
> What I atually need help here with is trying to explain to a friend (a
> member of a Viking/dark ages group that does very little food research)
> why the idea of separate "soup/appertiser"; "main" and "dessert" 
> courses is
> a modern invention.
>
> I'm trying to explan that a standard medieval remove would consist of a
> variety of dishes meant to bolster the eaters "humours"
>
> Am I totally off the beam on this?  Can anyone flip me a well worded
> explantion (including source) that I can pass one?
Well, I don't think I can point you to a specific explanation of this. 
However, I question why you need to show *why* they didn't keep all 
their sweet dishes until the last course of the meal. Rather I would 
hope that simply showing that that was the case would prove the point.

You said for a medieval meal, as opposed to a Viking meal. Even a 
viking age meal may be difficult to know, much less prove. Anyway, to 
check the meal structure for medieval meals, I would look to the 
records of the medieval meals we do have. You can find a subset of 
these meals and references to them, in this file in the FEASTS section 
of the Florilegium.
p-menus-msg       (49K)  3/21/01    Examples of medieval feast menus.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FEASTS/p-menus-msg.html

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****