[Sca-cooks] Intent or Interpretation

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Thu Mar 3 23:06:13 PST 2011


<mistressaldyth at gmail.com> wrote:
<<< Actually this was one of the recipes, and the other from Sent Sovi frying
cabbage in beef fat. Thanks for the ammunition. Salvo forth.. :-)) >>>

Heh.  And I didn't bother to list the other vegetable recipes that
*do* list olive oil as an alternate to pork fat.

Brighid ni Chiarain
===========

This works in Spain, which I think Brighid did take pains to specify. Further north olive oil would not have been as available.

This "olive oil is okay to use in Lent but the Church won't let us use butter. We don't have olive oil" did cause some controversy in northern Europe. Of course, the Church was headquartered in southern Europe and they had easy access to olive oil.

What are the "flash points"? burning temperatures? for olive oil vs. butter vs. animal fats? I suspect you can always cook a higher temperature oil at the lower temperature, but substituting the other way may change how things fry. We've discussed how different plant oils burn at different temperatures. I seem to remember olive oil being rather low compared to nut oils and others.

Does using Crisco and such instead of animal fats give a similar result yet make it vegetarian? I don't remember any discussion of the burning temperature for the solidified vegetable oils. Of course there are other health concerns which have been raised lately about using these solidified oils.

Here is some previous discussion which we've had on cooking oils, period and modern. I don't remember the question of whether changing the oil makes a period recipe non-period coming up before, though.

cooking-oils-msg (78K) 6/10/07 Period cooking and food oils.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/cooking-oils-msg.html

Stefan

--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****





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