[Sca-cooks] new book on English food
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Mon Sep 15 05:12:45 PDT 2008
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
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