[Sca-cooks] sugar and rice in Iberia

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Wed Jul 4 00:21:39 PDT 2007


Bear replied to Suey with
<<<
>    Further there is a statement at:
> http://european.hetto.org/european-food/25.html that Catalan recipe
> similar to blancmange in the 8th C. Is there any validity to that?  
> Or is
> Sent Sovi older than we think?
> Suey

I couldn't locate the quote, however; the recipes in the Sent Sovi were
collected at the time the manuscript was written.  The recipes were most
likely being used before they were collected, but we have no way to
determine how much earlier they were being used.  In this case, the  
recipe
is probably being casually tied to the Arab invasion of Iberia in 711  
and
the commonly accepted opinion that they brought rice and sugar to the
peninsula. >>>

711? Rice and sugar in Europe, even if you include Iberia, that  
early?  That is much earlier than I had gathered from earlier  
discussions. I'm surprised they wouldn't have spread north from there  
within centuries of then. I got the impression from earlier  
discussions that both came in from the east, not from the southwest.  
Or is this complicated by the fact that while known in Spain they  
weren't really widely used because they were still items that had to  
be imported from the east?

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****




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