[Sca-cooks] Any references to peaches being used in period brewing?

[Drew Shiel]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 5:32 AM, <JIMCHEVAL at aol.com> wrote:


> In France at least it is striking that pears, apples and mulberries were
> used for cider or alternate 'wines', but not for instance plums or sloe,
> which  archeology shows to have been very popular. Nor peaches, which were
> originally  an import, unlike the others (and which, strangely, appear in
> digs
> more  frequently than the native fruits). So the most likely answer is no,
> peaches  were not used, nor in fact was almost anything else besides
> grapes,
> pears,  apples and mulberries. And cider overall took until almost the end
> of
> the Middle  Ages to gain any importance.
>

I'm very interested in the absences of foods we know are present from
archaeological remains in period cookery texts. As a much later example,
I'm currently working on an Irish cookery book of 1810, which is in the
manuscript collection of the National Library of Ireland. There are recipes
to preserve oranges, apples, strawberries, black and red currants,
'plumbs', 'rasberries', gooseberries, and 'damacines' (damsons). But
there's nothing about bilberries, blackberries, sloes, or any of the other
wild fruit which would have been all around the rural house where the
cookery book was compiled. We know there were sloes used; there are huge
piles of the stones in the excavated refuse piles. And indeed, you can't
eat sloes fresh; they're much too sour. There's just no documentation (at
least in this example) for their preparation.

Le meas,
Aodh