[Sca-cooks] Recipe for period gingerbrede

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sep 9, 2009, at 5:14 PM, Antonia Calvo wrote:

>> But-it's a reasonable questions - they could have taken day old  
>> (not yet
>> dry) bread and broken it or rubbed it into "crumbs".
>>
>
>
> Yes, they could have, but I think the specific instruction to  
> *grate* is highly suggestive of *dry* bread.

Another consideration, FWIW, is that a light but swift hand using a  
grater with simple puckered holes punched in it, as opposed to the  
more sophisticated ones where the holes are sort of angled blades all  
pointing in the same direction, can be surprisingly effective in  
producing crumbs from any reasonably firm bread.

Sure, these are people who ate, used and baked a lot of bread and  
didn't have a lot of ways to keep it really fresh, and stale bread  
surely suggests itself.

But it's not inconceivable that semi-fresh bread was used for certain  
applications.

Another variable we haven't really talked about (AFAIK) is gluten  
content. We may be talking about lots or pre-gelatinized starch in  
medieval bread, fresh or dry, compared to many of the crunch- 
emphasizing dry bread crumb products on the market. A lot of them are  
not even actual bread before grinding, except in the broad sense that  
they're made from flour and baked...

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