[Sca-cooks] new book on English food

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sep 15, 2008, at 7:15 AM, Johnna Holloway wrote:

> It's a fun breezy sort of book that reads well, but I would check  
> and recheck all her "facts" and
> not trust it. Read C. Anne Wilson first.


I'd also question a couple of her assertions in the quoted passage  
alone: first, that with salt as the only fish preservation option  
available to most people, the diet was drearily boring (you want  
boring, have a go at stockfish, and they would have had the same  
problem with meat, and very possibly fewer varieties of domestic  
butcher's meat and game combined than the varieties of fish available,  
at least for the well-to-do, and for the poor, see the meat comments  
above), and second, the implication that Mary Tudor was any more  
"Bloody" than her sister, or that the restoration of some of the fish- 
day rules were not necessarily directly in service of the fishing  
industry. I mean, she is presumably aware that Mary was a practicing  
Catholic and Henry was not, right?

Adamantius


"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter