[Sca-cooks] Pickles (was Re: Weird food)

[Stefan li Rous]

Dragon said:

<<< People salted, pickled, dried, smoked and otherwise preserved foods
so they would have them out of season and through the winter. About
the only places this did not happen are in areas where salt was not
easily obtained or in hunter/gatherer societies. >>>

Yes, but even the societies which didn't have access to salt often  
still had to preserve foods through the winter. Iceland was one of  
these. When Nanna was on this list she gave us a lot of details about  
storage in whey, fermented shark and butter and other traditional  
Icelandic foods.

fd-Iceland-msg    (84K)  5/29/05    Food of medieval Iceland. Recipes.

<<< Pickles aren't just cucumbers, that is a rather American mind set.
You can pickle just about anything. Look at the gigantic variety of
pickled vegetables in Asian cultures, India, Russia and just about
any place you can think of that has ready access to large quantities  
of salt. >>>

Yes. Until I joined this group and the subject of pickling came up, I  
was under the mistaken impression that pickling meant the same as  
pickled cucumbers.

Perhaps you might be interested in these files.
In the FOOD section:
pickled-foods-msg (138K) 4/ 1/08    Medieval pickled food. recipes.
Lrds-Salt-Exp-art (15K)  9/11/00    "Lord's Salt Experiment" by Lady  
Hauviette
                                        d'Anjou.

In the FOOD-MEATS section:
pickled-meats-msg (60K)  3/20/08    Period pickled meats. Lord's  
Salt. recipes.

<<< We take salt for granted these days in the industrialized world. It
is ubiquitous and cheap (it was not always so, sometimes it was a
very dear commodity) and many of its uses in food preservation have
gone by the way side in our modern society.>>>

Yes, at times salt was heavily taxed, which kept if from being  
"cheap", but then there were also different grades of salt. Mined  
salt was different from salt created by evaporating sea water.
In the COMMERCE section:
salt-msg          (50K)  7/22/06    Medieval salt production and use.
salt-comm-art     (18K)  1/ 9/97    "Salt of the Earth" by Lord Xaviar.

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 ****