[Sca-cooks] Re: medieval dog recipes

[RUTH EARLAND]

I'm not going to argue about whether or not our medieval forbears ate dog. 
People ate a lot of things, and dog is still eaten in parts of the world. 
One of my Chinese colleagues was trying to shock me one day by telling me 
how good dog tasted. He seemed quite surprised when I responded by saying 
that dogs, as carnivores, probably didn't taste as good as herbivores, but 
people will eat what is available, and if you're hungry enough, anything 
will taste good.

What I will say is that last year, I cooked an Anglo-Saxon feast and had to 
do some pretty varied research. There just isn't a lot of documentation for 
a pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon feast, so I dug a bit. I was using Hagen's "Food 
and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England" books 1 and 2. She looked at a lot of 
research on rubbish. Based on the finds of Greenland trash heaps, she states 
that few dog bones showed signs of butchering compared to those of sheep and 
pigs. Which bears out the Scandinavian tradition of dogs being more useful 
as working or companion animals than as a food source. She relates that the 
dog bones that did show signs of butchering came from the later years of the 
settlement, when climate changes and disease had done their damage to the 
food supply.

So people may have eaten dog in period. But I'm betting that they didn't 
until they ran out of other meat.

Also keep in mind that for most of our period of interest, recipes were 
written by and for the rich. Even if the poor were eating anything that 
didn't eat them first, the rich would probably have more palatable things to 
eat.

Berelinde