[Sca-cooks] Oranges was Tudor Recipe help
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Fri Jun 12 05:43:57 PDT 2009
Nice quote. Apochryphally (and according to Wikipedia), the sweet oranges
referenced as a "Portugals" are all descended from a single root stock
brought from China by Vasco da Gama, said tree now residing at the Lisbon
home of the Count de Saint-Laurent. The story is almost certainly bogus
considering Da Gama never reached China and I haven't been able to locate
anything that ties Saint-Laurent to Lisbon. Louis XI's words make the tale
demostrably false. It also blows a big hole in the generally accepted
Portuguese introduction that I've held to for a number of years.
The quote lends some credence to a linguistic argument for the introduction
of sweet oranges to the Mediterranean via Persia in the Late Middle Ages.
Bear
> Since the recipe is given as being from "G. Markham- The English
> Housewife"
> it could well be a sweeter orange. Markham's EH first came out in 1615
> and appears often thereafter.
> There is a reliable online history of oranges. It's part of the book:
> Reuther, Webber, and Batchelor. /The Citrus Industry/. Revised Edition.
> Riverside, CA: University of California. Division of Agricultural
> Sciences, 1967. Volume I: History, World Distribution, Botany, and
> Varieties. http://lib.ucr.edu/agnic/webber/
> Actually they point out, as does Tolkowsky, that it's probable some sort
> of sweet orange was already growing
> "in the Mediterranean regions of Europe prior to Vasco da Gama's voyage of
> discovery of 1497 A.D"....
> because in 1483, "the king of France, Louis XI, ....requests that the
> governor send him "citrons and sweet oranges , muscatel pears and
> parsnips, and it is for the holy man who eats neither meat nor fish and
> you will be doing me a very great pleasure."
> Since the holy man referred to is Saint Francis of Paula, who had just
> arrived at the court of Louis XI,
> Tolkowsky considered it probable that the pious monk had already become
> accustomed to eating sweet oranges in his native country of Calabria.
> By the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was abundant
> evidence showing that the sweet orange had become well established and had
> assumed commercial importance in southern Europe."
>
> Johnnae
>
>
> Terry Decker wrote:
>> Unless you are doing very early Tudor, the orange could have been a sweet
>> orange. Sweet oranges enter Mediterranean Europe via Portugal in the
>> first quarter of the 16th Century and quickly became the favorite orange
>> of Europe. By Elizabethean times, sweet and sour oranges would have been
>> readily available.
>>
>> Bear
>
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