[Sca-cooks] Beaver meat recipes
Gretchen Beck
grm at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon Nov 22 12:49:27 PST 2010
--On Monday, November 22, 2010 1:30 PM -0700 Daniel Myers
<dmyers at medievalcookery.com> wrote:
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> From: Christiane <christianetrue at earthlink.net>
>>
>> Elinor Strangewayes on the East Kingdom list was asking about any
>> existing medieval or Renaissance recipes for beaver meat or beaver
>> tail. She's been having to trap them (nuisance on her property) and
>> she's got lots of them in her freezer now.
>>
>> I figured I'd ask here on the list, also out of my own curiousity;
>> the Florilegium doesn't seem to have anything in the meats section.
It's just out of period (attached to a mention from period). A note in
Furnivall's edition of Russell's The Boke of Nurture:
Under Kerving of Fish: "To peason or frumenty take the tayle of the bevere,
and the footnote says:
Topsell in his Fourfooted Beasts, ed. Rowland, 1658, p 36, says of Beavers,
"There hath been taken of them whose tails have weighted four pound weight,
and they are accounted a very delicate dish, for being dressed they eat
like Barbles: they are used by the Lotharingians and Savoyans [says
Bellonius] for meat allowed to be eaten on fish-dayes, although the body
that eareth them be flesh and unclean for food. ***[emphasis mine] The
manner of their dressing is, first roasting, and afterward seething in an
open pot; that so the evill vapour may go away, and some in pottage made
with Saffron; other with Ginger, and many with Brine; it is certain that
the tail and forefeet taste very sweet, from whence came the Proverbe, The
sweet is that fish, which is not fish at all"
toodles, margaret
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list