[Sca-cooks] olive oil too expensive to be used as a cooking oil?
Stefan li Rous
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Mon Jan 30 01:47:35 PST 2012
Sayyeda al-Kaslaania said:
<<< Miller, H.D., "The Pleasures of Consumption: The Birth of Medieval
Islamic Cuisine." in _Food: the History of Taste_. Edited by Paul H.
Freedman. Series: California Studies in Food and Culture. U of
California Press, 2007.Pp. 135-162.
According to Miller, olive oil would be served on the table as a
prized fat, too expensive for the entire cooking process during the
Middle Ages. >>>
Really?
I may be mis-remembering and perhaps this is specific to Islamic
cultures, but from earlier discussions here and, I think, from my
reading, I seem to remember that olive oil was fairly common around
the Mediterranean and was the most common cooking oil.
I seem to remember it being common enough that it caused some
religious friction between the northern and southern Christian
countries, because olive oil could be used during Lent, while butter,
the common cooking oil in the north, could not be used then.
What do the Middle Eastern/Islamic scholars here think? What have your
studies said about how common olive oil for cooking was?
We discussed before that fat and cooking oils were more expensive then
than now, but they did come up with enough to do deep-frying.
Thanks,
Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous Barony of Bryn Gwlad Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris Austin, Texas StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at: http://www.florilegium.org ****
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