[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




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