[Sca-cooks] Anything going on ?

[Sonia Murphy]

This is fascinating. I reckon it should be in the Florilegium. Stefan Li
Rous?

Thora

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 1:53 AM, Laura Minnick <lcm at jeffnet.org> wrote:

> Ah! Yes, there's Anthimus. He's 6th c. And then there's a huge gap, until
> you start getting the Anglo-Norman books, etc.
>
> So I've had to improvise. It's sort of a triangulation between several
> sources. I looked at climate and terrain, and what could be grown in the
> area. Wrote the German dept of agriculture, told them what I was doing, and
> they were quite happy to give me info on the growing zones and such, and
> what will generally grow where. I went through the capitularies and
> manorial accounts and looked at what they were growing and what livestock
> they were raising. I found out what was growing seasonally. So I had a good
> idea of what could be grown in the area, and what I knew that they were
> growing, which tells me what they ate, just not how.
>
> For how, I looked at the previous books- Roman, Anthimus, etc., so I knew
> how people before then prepared their food. And I looked at later books to
> see what had changed, which gave me an idea of the arc, so to speak. Also
> gleaned other bits from medical documents and such. Case in point: as an
> older man, Charlemagne was having periods of ill health (seems to be
> gastrointestinal), and his doctors insisted that he stop eating roasted
> meat, and eat boiled meat only. This tells me that people were eating
> roasted meat- at least the Emperor was! And continued to- basically his
> reply was that he'd eat what he pleased. (It's good to be the king!)
> Similar things, like clerics writing about dissolute monks eating rich
> foods, etc. Even found a letter from Alcuin to an abbot, telling him to not
> feed so many beans to the monks, lest the results disturb services!
>
> And I also looked at what facilities and tools they had available to work
> with- after all, they didn't have my kitchen, or even my camp kitchen to
> work in.
>
> From there, I put it all together and mixed in a bit of my brain, which
> admittedly is not medieval, but has been studying medieval food for
> something like 30 years. I found it interesting that as I've been in the
> middle of all of this, Giano put out the CA on Frankish food, and to my
> delight I found that we'd been thinking much along the same lines. We could
> have easily cooked in each other's kitchen.
>
> Does that answer your question, Your Grace?
>
> Liutgard
>
>
>
> On 8/28/2016 9:52 AM, David Friedman wrote:
>
>> Tell us about "Frankish stuff." The only source that occurs to me is
>> Anthimus.
>>
>>