[Sca-cooks] Re: Mediterranean food

[Christiane]

Here's what Clifford Wright has to say about the use of butter and other animal fats in medieval Sicilian cuisine. What's really interesting to me is that he mentions the village where my grandmother came from, Corleone.
     "In the fourteenth century and up until the beginning of the eighteenth century, animal fats such as butter, bacon, lard, mutton fat (perhaps a vestige of the Arab presence), and beef suet were the fats used in Sicilian cooking. In fact, the preferred cooking fat in fifteenth-century Sicily was butter. According to the stricfizarii (taxation records), these were the largest purchases. In Corleone, a mountain town of western Sicily, butter was sold in a quartara, a kind of narrow-necked earthenware vessel and was sometimes the only food to accompany the bread available to the agricultural workers who used it frequently in place of cheese.
    Although olive oil, the cooking fat most closely associated with Sicilian cooking today, has been produced continually throughout Sicilian history, it was rare and expensive until recently. Although butter was used more than olive oil in Sicily, and it was a primary cooking fat, its production and distribution was neverthless limited. In the Middle Ages, only the Jews bought olive oil in quantity as pork fat was forbidden to them (the Muslim Sicilians having suffered their final expulsion in the 1230s). The Jewish cooks’ fondness for olive oil is partly behind this, but also most merchants dealing in Sicilian olive oil for export were Jews. Don’t let the abundant use of olive oil in contemporarySicilian recipes fool you into thinking that olive oil was always abundant in Sicily. When olive oil, with its modest production, was used, it was used on bread or for seasoning dried vegetable soups."

There are some useful essays on Mr. Wright's site about food history for the Mediterranean region. http://www.cliffordawright.com

Gianotta

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ekoogler1 at comcast.net
Sent: Jan 30, 2004 2:28 PM
To: Christiane <christianetrue at earthlink.net>, 
	Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Mediterranean food

Odd...because what I've read so far from the essays in "Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe" indicates that, in the Mediterranean area, olive oil was used more than butter.  In fact, in southern France, it says that the only dairy product that was widely used was cheese.

Kiri