[Sca-cooks] "Bojal" wheat - Wikipedia articles

Sun Jan 3 09:53:17 PST 2010

It seems to me that I have two bones to pick with Wikipedia. When a 
friend gave me a panel of copies of the entrance of a Middle Eastern 
emperor into Florence as a guest of Lorenzo Medici, the originals being 
in the Medici chapel there, I looked up the history of this mural in 
Wikipedia. Count Trebi, from Venice, is our neighbor. He is the retired 
Chair of the Art History Department at the Catholic University in 
Santiago, Chile. I gave him a copy the article. He said there were many 
mistakes. I asked him to correct them which as of to date he has not 
done. At 80+ he is still lecturing none stop. At that time there was a 
space where one could do that in Wikipedia. Now I do not find that window.
I agree with Bear that "common wheat" is to vague. Emmer is more 
logical.  Bojal wheat has me upset because the author does not footnote 
his statement. I do not where he got that from. Nor do I know who the 
author is.
We are going off for a week on summer holiday now with the count and the 
countess. I will take a copy of the Medici article with me in hopes of 
tying the count down to correct it. When I come back I hope one of you 
will be so kind as to have found information for me so I can write to 
Wikipedia to correct the Medici article and that somehow we can contact 
someone to find out where the "bojal" source comes from and what it means.
Thank you all so much for helping me with this.
Suey

Bear wrote:
> It would be more correct to say the Wikipedia article is limited, in fact 
> most general discussions of wheat have limitations.  For example, I would 
> question the use of the term "common wheat."  Modernly, common wheat is 
> Triticum aestivum, but in the 7th Century BCE, it would have been emmer, 
> Triticum dicoccum.  I, too, would like to know the references.
>
> The Berbers did make extensive use of durum and it is fair to say that they 
> brought the extensive cultivation of durum to some areas of Europe.  It is 
> also possible (and probable) that durum was being grown is some places long 
> before the Berbers arrived.  There is archeological evidence that durum was 
> being grown in North Africa as early as the 1st Century BCE and was very 
> likely around before that.  Whether or not we can credit the Carthaginians 
> is open to question, but durum would definitely have been encountered by the 
> Romans who controlled the North African granary after burying the 
> Carthaginians in the Punic Wars, the Vandals, who siezed the North African 
> granary and made Carthage their capitol, and the Byzantines, who put the 
> Vandals out of business in the 5th Century and retained control of the North 
> African grain trade until they were overrun by the Berbers in 697 CE. 
> Initial cultivation of durum in Spain could have occurred centuries before 
> the Berbers arrived.
>
> As a small aside, there are a number of sources which credit the Romans with 
> introducing wheat into Britian.  However, the Greek explorer Pytheas, 
> reported large quantities of wheat being grown in Britian around 330 BCE, 
> almost three hundred years before Julius Caesar started the incorporation of 
> Britian into the Roman Empire.  Even good sources can be wrong.
>
> My reasoning for suggesting Triticum turgidum durum as "bojal" wheat is that 
> durum is believed to be of African origin, that it was grown in the region 
> around Carthage, and that it is a very hard wheat, in fact the grains are 
> physically harder than those most other varieties of wheat.  Antonia's 
> casual linguistic research appears to support my opinion.  I don't know 
> whether I am right or wrong in my opinion, but it is enough for me to 
> question what is common knowledge of the foodstuffs of the Islamic 
> expansion.
>
> The problem with red wheat is most of those strains are T. aestivum, which 
> would not likely have been available to the Carthaginians.  Einkorn, emmer 
> and spelt are the most common wheats of the period (~10,000 BCE - ~700 CE, 
> if you agree with generally accepted sources).  Einkorn was largely 
> displaced by emmer, which in turn was displaced by T. compactum and T 
> aestivum, but that displacement is considerably later than 7th Century BCE.
>
> Two other possibilities come to mind, T. turgidum conicum and T. polonicum, 
> but the limited information I have on those two species doesn't seem to 
> match the limited specifics for "bojal" wheat.
>
> Bear
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 21:56:02 -0800 (PST)
> From: Euriol of Lothian <euriol at yahoo.com>
> To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] OOP: What are they teaching are kids?
> Message-ID: <550320.37142.qm at web51708.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Funny thing is, in my son's class (not his friend's) their teacher has really done a lot with them, including poached eggs. However, I do admit I've never poached an egg nor eaten a poached egg before.
> I think this is something I need to rectify this year.
>
> Euriol
>
>  Euriol of Lothian, OP
> Clerk, Order of the Pelican, Kingdom of ?thelmearc
> Chronicler, Barony of Endless Hills
>
>
> "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy."
> -Robindranath Tagore, Poet/Playwright/Essayist 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Kingstaste <kingstaste at comcast.net>
> To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
> Sent: Sat, January 2, 2010 11:03:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] OOP: What are they teaching are kids?
>
> I had to ask the same question when a friend's daughter that is just about
> finished with 2 years of Culinary School was at my house and the Food
> Network was on.  Whatever the program was (I believe it might have been a
> Good Eats rerun) they were poaching an egg, and she says "I've never seen a
> poached egg before."  I started questioning her, and sure enough, not only
> had she never poached an egg, but in two years of school they had not
> covered egg cookery (she had scrambled eggs), breakfast cooking, or even the
> factoid about the folds in the chef's hat being indicative of the number of
> ways one could cook an egg.  I told her that her father should go and demand
> his tuition money back!
> Why, in my day, we were poaching eggs before the sun came up every morning!
> These kids today, with their fancy gadgets and sous vides, they just don't
> know the classics....
> Christianna
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sca-cooks-bounces+kingstaste=mindspring.com at lists.ansteorra.org
> [mailto:sca-cooks-bounces+kingstaste=mindspring.com at lists.ansteorra.org] On
> Behalf Of Euriol of Lothian
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 1:33 PM
> To: SCA Cooks zzEmail
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] OOP: What are they teaching are kids?
>
> Many of you may know that my eldest son and two of his best friends are in
> their second year in the culinary arts program at the county vocational
> school. So I like to get them involved when I'm cooking at home to see what
> they can teach me from their school and what I can teach them.
>
> Yesterday I hosted my annual "Game Day" party which I like to just have the
> food be a variety of finger foods. Inspired by pairing some pancakes with
> cranberry sauce and lemon yogurt as a means to use up leftovers, I thought
> to use the little baked filo pastry shells and fill them with a layer of
> cranberry sauce that I had made for Christmas and top it off with a freshly
> made lemon curd. So I ask my son's friend to zest two lemons for me in order
> to make the curd, something he's not done before. So once he was done with
> the zesting, he asked me how he had done. I looked at the plate of zest and
> said "Great". I went to take care of something else for a moment and when I
> went to grab the plate of zest, all the zest was gone. I asked my son's
> friend "What happened to the zest?" He replied "I threw it away".  And sure
> enough, there it was in the garbage. He thought That I was just looking to
> have the lemon itself without the zest not knowing that it was the
> zest I was looking for (as well as the juice).
>
> So... I just wonder exactly what they are teaching those kids in that
> culinary arts program as they are now into their second year.
>
> I had a good laugh, and luckily more lemons... So he went back to the job of
> zesting the lemons.
>
> Euriol of Lothian, OP
> Clerk, Order of the Pelican, Kingdom of ?thelmearc
> Chronicler, Barony of Endless Hills
>
>
> "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was
> service. I acted and behold, service was joy."
> -Robindranath Tagore, Poet/Playwright/Essayist 1913 Nobel Prize for
> Literature
>
>
>
>       
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> End of Sca-cooks Digest, Vol 45, Issue 6
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