[Sca-cooks] Polish Banquets - 16th-18th Centuries

[Elise Fleming]

Greetings!  While looking through Jean-Louis Flandrin's book ("Arranging 
the Meal") mentioned in a post I just sent to the list, I found a 
chapter at the end entitled "Polish Banquets in the Sixteenth, 
Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries.  Flandrin writes, "My objective 
is to single out what surprised foreign, and particularly French, 
travelers about these banquets and what struck them as typically Polish 
manners.  The chapter runs from p. 118-125.

Quickly scanning the beginning parts, it was noted by Hauteville that 
much meat and little bread was eaten.  French travelers noted the 
absence of any soup.  Apparently there was soup in the general diet (a 
beer soup in the morning), but no soup with dinner or supper.

Impressing the French was the variety of sauces: sauces with saffron, 
cream, onion, prune juice, all containing "a lot of sugar, pepper, 
cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, olives, capers, pine nuts, and 
currants.  These sauces were generally intended for first-course meats - 
presumably boiled - but were interchangeable, not specific to a 
particular meat."

For people with an interest in Polish foods in the 1500s-1600s, you 
might want to see about borrowing this book from a library.

Alys K.
-- 
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/