[Sca-cooks] from bacon to the availability of other meats
Stefan li Rous
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Wed Apr 13 15:20:32 PDT 2005
William de Grandfort said:
> The mention of bacon alone indicates that she did
> have ample pork as a protein source, and if she had bacon, then she
> likely had ham, and hocks and shoulder and rib as well.
And Jadwiga replied
> Gies and Gies and other sources indicate that bacon and other small
> portions of meat were often given to day laborers as hire or given out
> among the customary exchanges for harvest help. So she might not have
> had a pig in order to have bacon.
In addition, even if you raise the pig, that doesn't mean you keep the
ham, hocks, shoulder and rib meats. Depending upon the local economy,
those may be salable items. The bacon would have been less so and it
might have been kept and eaten by this individual, as it was by other
peasants, and the rest of the meat sold. Unfortunately, I can't
remember my precise sources for this.
There are also problems with taking individual peasants and using them
as examples of the peasant class as a whole. The economic life of
peasants covered a wide span, even within a particular place and time.
You could for instance, have serfs which were better off economically
than free peasants. And very poor peasants on up to those who had
substantial material goods for the times.
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 ****
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