[Sca-cooks] Period Flour Query

[Terry Decker]

>
> Thanks so much for the first answers. They help a lot.  In the  archives I
> found references to semolina-sourdough being 13th century  Andalusian. 
> That
> must be just the type of bread, not the flour per  se?

Semolina is a flour produced from Triticum turgidum (durum wheat).  It is a 
high gluten or "hard" flour that is usually a little coarse and is most 
commonly used in pasta making.  Sourdough is the type of bread the name 
referring to the leavening, a natural occurring mixture of wild yeast and 
lactobacilli, and the acid (sour) flavor it produces.  Sourdough dates from 
at least 3000 BCE and semolina is likely quite a bit older than the 13th 
Century.  There is quite a bit of information on sourdoughs in the 
Florilegium.


>And I would think that
> from cultivated crops I could get what was  available in which area when. 
> Is
> there anything written about what was naturally  occurring as far as the
> grain/grass/nut in a particular area?

The earliest signs of grain cultivation are at least 10,000 years old and 
probably represent seasonal planting by hunter gatherers rather than tended 
crops.  By the time we are discussing most of these Old World grains are 
ubiquitous in Europe.  To determine the actual percentages of grains at any 
time and place you need to investigate tax rolls, inventories and household 
accounts.  The closest thing I can think of to a single source is by a 
gentleman named White and is a primary text on Medieval agriculture, but it 
probably won't give you the granularity you seek.

One also must take into account that there was a fairly widespread commerce 
in grains beginning in the late 12th Century or early 13th Century.  Take a 
look at the Hanseatic League for some idea of how extensive it was.

>
> In one of the shortbread discussions it mentions adding rice flour to the
> (see list of flour) for making it crumbly.  At the risk of being really 
> dumb,
> did shortbread originally have rice flour in it? I just have a hard time
> visualizing rice paddies in Scotland.  :-))
>
> Aldyth

A lot of Scotland is cold and wet with poor cropland, which makes oats one 
of the primary crops there.  Rice in Northern Europe is mostly imported from 
the south, although I vaguely remember some period experiments in rice 
growing in France outside of the French Mediterranean region.

There is a recipe for Fine Cakes in the Florilegium that Bogdan and I 
experimented with that the flour used is toasted wheat flour.  Rice flour is 
a little too fine for for making shortbread in my opinion, but it is a 
period thickener.

Bear