[Sca-cooks] Re: Siege Cookery at Talonvale: The Premise and Ingre dients

[Harris Mark.S-rsve60]

Iasmin replied to me with:
>>>
> Wow. Not a wide variety, especially for the meat. It will be 
> interesting to see what folks came up with. Hope they liked goat. :-)
 
Quite a bit of variety, I'd say. The list of dishes is at work and I've 
still not finished writing it up but I hope to tomorrow. One of the 
common complaints was that there were almost too many choices.
<<<
Maybe I missed something, but the only meat items I saw were goat and goat bones, which is what I was referring to by not much variety. I don't doubt that some folks can come up with a variety of dishes with that. I'm amazed at the wide variety of food dishes that the teams seem to come up with and am looking forward to seeing your report on the final dishes for this contest.
 
>>>>
> What is "saracen corn"?
Buckwheat.
<<<<

Ah! Okay. I'd never heard this term before. Come to think of it, I don't remember that much discussion of buckwheat here, either. How does buckwheat differ from wheat? And what period recipes do we have that use it? Is it more of an East European grain than west? Or, from the name, was it really not available in Europe during the Middle Ages? Of course, white wheat being the preferred grain, perhaps "saracen" refers to lower quality rather than a place of origin?

Stefan