[Sca-cooks] Asia to Middle East to Europe

[Volker Bach]

Am Samstag, 15. Oktober 2005 20:30 schrieb Daniel Phelps:
> Stefan asked:
>
> Can anyone think of any other
>
> > central or southwestern Asian item that made it to the Middle East
> > but not to Europe within a reasonable time after that, which did
> > later catch on in Europe?
>
> Ok when to arrive in the ME and when to later catch on later in Europe?
>
> At a guess quat and duran fruit never caught on in Europe :-).
>
> I suggest that yogurt, henna, bananas, coconuts, frequent bathing, gun
> powder, certain medical practices, lenses and eye glasses, faceted gem
> stones, distillation, perfumery, certain board games, true porcelain,
> certain mathematical/accounting concepts, calendar reform and temperance
> caught on significantly later in Europe.  I'm just not sure if all of these
> came out of Asia first.

I think there is a problem with many of the items listed. Some of them are 
simply climate-dependent. The banana can not catch on in Europe before 
refrigerated rapid transport, for example. Yogurt is another example. 
Anthimus mentions in his 'Observations of Food' something called 'melca', a 
kind of coagulated milk popular at the time. It is not yogurt, but it is not 
likely to have been different enough for anyone but a connoisseur to 
appreciate the difference. Hence, no need. And rest assured I can say from 
experience that madder will stain skin and fingernails as reliably as henna 
(wooden spoon next time). 

Frequent bathing and perfumery were both popular in many parts of Europe - so 
popular that, on occasion, the church had to intervene and limit the 
practice. Of course this, too, is background-dependent, and I doubt a crofter 
in rural Scotland got to bathe very often, but that was not a question of 
choice. Sources indicate that bathing daily was common practice among, for 
example, the urban upper classes of Salerno in the 12th century. 

When did true porcelain make it to the middle east? I know of glazed pottery 
that looked a bit like it, but these, too, were copied in Europe (Theophilus 
Presbyter records recipes for the glaze). 

As to calendar reform and mathematics, I am not friends with numbers, from 
what little I do understand the Computus of Bede is quite complex, and  
matters calendaric were something of an obsession in Dark Age Europe. 
Indian-derived Arabic numbers took longer to be accepted there, that is true.

Finally, temperance was much appreciated in medieval Europe, though more often 
in praise than practice. Among many others, the Regula Magistri (and, I 
believe, Benedicti) restricts alcohol of any kind to the sick and Tannhäuser 
is very clear on the fact that a noble man *never* drinks to excess. 

It is often assumed (and entire history books are based around it) that 
medieval Europe lived in self-imposed darkness for centuries until it finally 
decided to learn from the civilised nations around it. This account is rather 
flawed, for one thing because it takes places like England, the Rhineland or 
Northern France as its baseline for 'Europe', and for another because it 
assumes that the Europeans would have been freely able to 'learn'. I think 
the modern Third World makes a better analogy. It is not that Africans are 
ignorant of mobile phones, soap or flush toilets. Also, if we look at all of 
Europe, we see more of a civilisational cline, from a high level in Greece 
and Italy to - comparatively - primitive poverty in the Baltic or Scotland. 
And even these civilisations are now known to have been far more refined than 
originally assumed. 

Sorry to rant. This is one of the common representations that riles me 
particularly, not least because it is not simply untrue, just oversimplified.

Giano


	

	
		
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