[Sca-cooks] Another look at a Florilegium entry...

[Susan Fox-Davis]

Y'all are really trying hard to make me change my mind, aren't you? 
 Well I'll at least give you a "Maybe."  The pony-handler with the ax 
over his shoulder looks really evocative to me though.  

We know that the English have a long tradition against eating horses, 
but the French did not.  
The French were just beginning to turn away from horsemeat late in the 
20th Century -- then Mad Cow Disease hit. This article does not 
definitely say whether equines can get BSE, but they are seen throughout 
Europe as a "safe" red meat.  See ABC article: 
 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/britain010212_ponies.html

Selene C.

Elaine Koogler wrote:

> I just checked an article I remembered on this topic from "Medieval 
> Food and Drink" series of essays published by the Center for Early 
> Renaissance Studies at Binghampton University of the University of New 
> York. The article, entitled "Eating and Drinking in the Bayeux 
> Tapestry" by Rouben Cholakian, is a discussion of all of the scenes in 
> the tapestry that deal with food and drink. In the part of the essay 
> where this specific panel is discussed, he describes the bovines and 
> the pig being taken to slaughter, mentioning that they seem to be 
> headed in the wrong direction. He makes no mention of the pony being 
> slaughtered as well. In fact he totally ignores the presence of the 
> animal, with its handler, at all. I have to admit I had always thought 
> that it was carrying stuff in the paniers over its back...rather than 
> being slaughtered to be part of the feast...but that could be a 
> deduction that I made based on not being used to seeing horsemeat used 
> as part of a meal.
>
> Kiri
>
> Susan Fox-Davis wrote:
>
>> Certainly the Saxon taboo is where we get it from.  But this was a 
>> Norman
>> banquet, without that particular prohibition.  Doubtless they shocked 
>> the
>> Saxons silly.
>>
>> Selene
>>
>> On 5/16/04 4:44 PM, "Patricia Collum" <pjc2 at cox.net> wrote:
>>  
>>