[Sca-cooks] potato dishes for breakfast

[Sue Clemenger]

Breakfast potatoes:
Nothing fancy, Stefan.  I was mostly concentrating on the lovely oatmeal.
;o) And the lovely butter.  The potatoes I remember most easily were served
in a crisp, square patty, like some sort of fish cake, or maybe compressed
hashbrowns, but that's not the texture they had.  That was un-chunky.  I
suspect that the taters were finely shredded, or perhaps even mashed,
although that texture wasn't quite it, either.  At any rate, they were very
nice.
And I always had good, strong tea over there.  Or one of the local
colas/bottled beverages.  Didn't bother with trying to find good coffee,
which I knew I could get, back here in my part of Artemisia.
Lent:
Yes, the restrictions do include cheeses, as they include all dairy products
(eggs, milk, cheeses, etc.  I don't know anything about the cheese-keeping
in the middle ages, but I bet you could look in the Flori-thingy <firmly
sticks tongue out in the direction of Ansteorra>.
I had been given to understand (in one of those
informal-but-makes-sense-even-if-it's-not-particularly-scholarly ways) that
one of the reasons for Lenten abstinence from dairy was seasonal--milk
animals needing to be more concerned about feeding their young for a bit.
I'm actually not sure (and perhaps someone else will know) what dairy men
(then or now) did/do in the way of letting their pregnant cattle/sheep/goats
dry up, and how long they're allowed to feed their babies before said babies
get weaned.....
I do know that late winter/early spring was always the worst time for
getting a decent number of eggs from our hens.  Probably a combination of
short daylight hours and cold, signally internal changes in the
chickens.....
--Maire

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan li Rous" <StefanliRous at austin.rr.com>
To: "SCA-Cooks maillist SCA-Cooks" <SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 12:09 AM
Subject: [Sca-cooks] potato dishes for breakfast


> Maire commented:
>  >>>
> One of my sincere regrets was not being able to get some good seafood
> when I
> was in Dublin, but the restaurant I'd wanted to visit was closed for
> renovations, and I wasn't there long enough to hunt down another one.
> Closest I came to it was eating fish-and-chips on the ferry between
> Holyhead
> and Dublin.  I did have the most amazing Indian cuisine there, though.
> Twice.  <weg> Curry heaven!  And some interesting potato dishes (for
> breakfast).
> <<<
>
> So what were these potato dishes? I'm not sure I can think of that
> many ways to serve potatoes, expecially for breakfast. But then some
> folks idea of breakfast foods is much larger than mine. (cold pizza
> for breakfact? Yuck. At least microwave it. :-) ). Or were these
> Indian potato dishes? That would probably expand the possibilities a
> bit.
>
>  >>>
> --Maire, counting the days until she can have dairy again....
> <<<
>
> Does that Lenten restriction include cheeses as well? I thought part
> of the deal was saving the milk for the calves and such, but cheese
> could have been from last year's harvest. Although some of the
> fasting seems to be to give a religious reason for giving up
> something you don't have anyway. But that would also indicate that
> cheeses weren't kept over a year. We know that medieval wines were
> often going bad before the next year's crop came in. Do we have any
> evidence of any medieval cheeses being kept longer than a year?