[Sca-cooks] Spices and the Irish Common folk

[Volker Bach]

Am Samstag, 25. März 2006 23:40 schrieb Tom Vincent:

> Anyway, we were talking about food preparation methods for 14th century
> common folk:  I'll stick with my earlier conclusions.  Common folk in
> the 14th century were essentially subsistence farmers with little to no
> access to spices or herbs as such or beef or cookbooks or recipes.  They
> scraped together what they could and stretched it into as many meals as
> they could until it went bad.  If they found some vegetable matter that
> was edible, they'd throw it in the pot without a thought as to whether
> it was a herb, fruit, berry, leaf, stem, root, flower or pod.  They
> couldn't read, weren't educated and didn't travel.
>
> That isn't speculation, pure or adulterated, or even 'prejudice' against
> 14th century common folk.  It's the result of education, research and
> maybe even a bit of common sense.

Was Ireland really that different from the Continent? In German medieval 
literature, we have the scene in Meir Helmbrecht that has farmers celebrating 
the return of a lost son with carefully prepared feast-day fare (with the son 
complaining that he is 'only' getting cabbage and bacon and roast goose 
because he wants white bread manchet loaves and chicken - it is a moral 
fable, after all). Pfaff Amis tells a funny story about an itinerant priest 
tricking a farmer into believing in his supernatural powers by having 
delicious fish 'appear' in the freshwater spring near his farm, and the 
dialogue again reveals that the farmer both relishes high quality fish and is 
glad of the spring because it provides 'good' drinking water (though he can 
also provide ale if that is preferred). Then there is the either very late 
14th or early 15th 'Ring Epic', a satire describing a village wedding that 
also shows appreciation of good food, though its humorous point is that 
peasants appreciate the 'wrong' food. I do not buy into the idea that these 
are prpojections of upper-class attitudes into the lower odrers precisely 
because in two important cases the story hinges on the idea that the lower 
orders appreciate different kinds of food (in one case approvingly, in the 
other with heavy-handed humor). 

Also, most societies depending on seasonal food supplies tend to be good at 
preservation. Living from food source to food source is a dangerous strategy. 

Volker


	

	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de