[Sca-cooks] Tudor Recipe help

[Johnna Holloway]

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