[Sca-cooks] serving fresh fruit

[wheezul at canby.com]

> Find evidence for serving fresh, raw fruits and vegetables at medieval
> foods has been rather difficult to document for various reasons.
>
> Such items could only be served for a few weeks or months each year, even
> less for fresh fruit juices. It wasn't that long ago that a question on
> the serving of fresh fruit or juices would be met with "it wasn't done" or
> "juices would ferment before they could be used". Folks have dug up
> evidence of both of these being served, but we still don't have enough
> evidence to say yes or no for specific cultures and times.
>
> Fresh fruits and juices would often have come from private gardens and
> manor stocks, so they don't show up in purchasing records.

I can add that there is quite a bit of information in the German books
like the translation of Petrus' work, or in Ryff's big herbal that should
address some of 16th century German culture.  One of my goals is to go
through them and look for the many culinary tidbits.  The entries on the
trees/fruits/plants include quite useful information on comsumption in
additional to the medicinal properties and are generally illustrated as
well.  But the backlog of stuff to translate is pretty daunting and I wish
it actually was my job! :)

And I have a really hard time believing that a primate wouldn't eat raw
fruit when it was available with the normal caveat of weirder things have
happened...

Katherine