[Sca-cooks] Siege food

[Suey]

  Donna wrote:
> On the topic of siege food, my sweetie has a book on the Hugenot wars and it has a translation of a letter which gives instructions on cooking shoes and other bits of leather to make them into food. The letter was apparently written during a siege and the supply of possible commestables was getting low.
>
It would be nice to know how they did it. In 1422 just after Juan II's 
marriage to Maria of Aragon, he was abducted by his brother-in-law and 
taken prisoner with his wife to Talavera. As "imprisonment" had a loose 
sense of the word, he went "hunting" one day which subsequently incurred 
a cowboy and Indian chase through Extremadura. Finally he took refuge in 
a castile and was surrounded by bro-in-law and hi troops. Juan and his 
party survived by eating their horses, saddles, gloves - whatever. Later 
on the Master of the knightly order of Alcantera gets into what I call 
'barons wars' in Extremadura and he surrounds his enemy in a castle who, 
with his wife and troops, live off of leather after the animals were 
consumed.
Suey