[Sca-cooks] [Fwd: Nutmeg in stale ale]
Laura C. Minnick
lcm at jeffnet.org
Sat Aug 2 02:45:29 PDT 2008
So, what do you all think? Why is the nutmeg in 'stale ale'?
'Lainie
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Nutmeg in stale ale
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 11:22:26 +0200
From: Brian S Lee <brianlee at XSINET.CO.ZA>
Reply-To: Chaucer Discussion Group <CHAUCER at LISTSERV.UIC.EDU>
To: CHAUCER at LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
References: <4888934E.60409 at amherst.edu>
Fresh from a reading of John Keay's history of _The Spice Route_ (2005),
I can better appreciate the absurdity of Thopas's adventuring into the
forest of exotic spices incredibly located in Flanders. Chaucer selects
the rarest and so most valuable of spices, cetewale (zedoary) from Java,
cloves from Ternate, and nutmeg from Banda, each further east than the
last, but their origins in the mysterious regions beyond India totally
unknown in medieval Europe. Pepper, the commonest spice, he
significantly doesn't mention. Thopas's world is one of precious
luxury, marred by the sudden injection of reality, that stale ale which
was doubtless all too common in the experience of readers (hearers) of
tail-rhyme romances.
Nutmeg, apparently, is a prestigious thing to keep in the kitchen
cupboard ("in cofre"). You wouldn't waste your most valuable spice
(would you?) in stale ale. Would it help to improve or disguise the
flavour if you did? Never having tried it, I await the comments of the
culinary experts on this list. The Host wanted a drink of moist and
corny ale to help him recover from the Physician's Tale: does moist
simply mean fresh? Isn't all ale moist? Is stale the opposite of
moist, the result of neglect or poor brewing perhaps, or are these
technical terms for different kinds of ale? Why put nutmeg in both
kinds, or is "stale" simply Chaucer's hint at the thoughtless use
of cliches for rhyme in the romances he's burlesquing?
Brian
"With that long knife inside her, much I fear
She'll go pale, ailing, into her small bier"
Leicester Silk Buckingham (1859) parodying Knowles's play of
Virginia.
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