[Sca-cooks] Olive oil (was Re: Bread Recipe from my files)
Daniel Myers
edoard at medievalcookery.com
Sat Jul 14 07:26:05 PDT 2007
On Jul 12, 2007, at 2:08 PM, V A wrote:
> Olive oil was (and has been, for all of recorded history) used
> prolifically
> for many purposes -- medicinal, cosmetic, and culinary -- all along
> the
> Mediterranean. Of course, the farther north you go in Europe, the
> harder it
> is to cultivate olives, so if olive oil was used in northern
> Europe, it
> would have been (for most of the Middle Ages) a fairly expensive
> commodity,
> since it had to be imported...so if you're looking at, say, 14th-
> century
> English recipes, you wouldn't see a ton of olive oil, but it'd be
> all over
> the Italian cookbooks of the same period.
While olives (or at least olive oil) would have been imported into
northern Europe, I don't believe that they were so rare as to be
hugely expensive.
We already see a substantial use of almonds in 14th century English
cooking, and they also were imported. They're a substantial
component a large number of meatless-day recipes. Like almonds,
olive oil keeps and travels well. As it is a vegetable oil, it is
also suited to meatless-day recipes. It is quite easy to imagine an
English merchant purchasing many barrels of it each year through an
agent in Italy (where it would be quite cheap).
Professor John H. Munro's article, "Spices and Their Costs in
Medieval Europe" (see link) has demonstrated that the cost of
imported spices was much lower than commonly believed (by my
calculations, about 10 times what we'd pay in the grocery store today
- no where near "worth its weight in gold").
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~munro5/SPICES1.htm
I'll try to find more concrete evidence, but given the above in
connection with the number of recipes I've seen which call for olive
oil (including some that use it for frying), I'm inclined to believe
that while it was more expensive than lard, it was not considered
overly expensive and was commonly used in large quantities by the
middle and upper classes.
- Doc
-=-=-=-
374. Take fayre caboges, and boyle yt in fayre water, an stere it
wyl, an ley on Pepir an Safroun, Maces, Clowys, an a lytil verious an
salt, an thanne serue hem forth in a fayre dysshe. [The Boke of
Swyllyng]
-=-=-=-
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