[Sca-cooks] HIstoric accuracy

[Kathleen Madsen]

There's actually quite a lot of husbandry research on dairy animals, and while most of it dates to the early part of the 1900's quite a lot of modern day research has helped to scientifically fill in missing information.

The University of Oklahoma has a terrific website on historic breeds and their research.  There is a growing number of countries that are working to preserve historic breeds and are providing a lot of information on the animal, it's structure, and profile their end product; be it meat, as a work animal, or fluid milk.  It's quite an active area of research right now and quite  large number of scientists are working on where breeds came from and how the massive crossbreeding of the late 1800's and all of the 1900's has changed them.  Really very interesting stuff.

http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/

Eibhlin

> O.K., I know that this is one of those questions which will
> show my
> ignorance, but without admitting our ignorance, how do we
> learn? 
> 
> Just out of curiosity, where did you (or the person who
> wrote the article)
> find documentation on things like the viscosity of milk,
> the ration of milk
> fat to fluid milk and such?  I can understand how we might
> know the
> difference in species of fruit as recordedly used in
> period, but how can we
> be certain of characteristics such as viscosity and flavor?
>  Where were such
> things recorded? 
> 
> Always learning, 
> Celia