[Sca-cooks] Period Feasts, bread, butter

[Stefan li Rous]

Bear highlighted:
<<< Bread of some form was served at almost every meal.  Based on the available 
records, it is estimated that per capita consumption averaged 1 to 2 pounds 
per day. >>>

I think we’ve discussed this before, but wow. That’s seems like a lot of bread. Whether it is light and fluffy or dense, whole wheat. That’s a loaf or bread. Or two.

Even with Bear’s bread, I suspect that if you served a loaf of bread (or even only 1/2 a loaf) per person at an SCA feast, you’d have a lot of left over bread. Maybe if it was spread over 5 or 6 hours, but...

At our feast this past Saturday, I only ate a couple of slices of bread. And that was mostly because I was waiting on the rest of feast and there was some cheese to finish up. Chunks of cheese. No butter. My wife kept complaining of no butter. Not no honey butter, but no butter. I did barely have seconds on the venison stew, but I was full.

Even with only two meals that seems like a awful lot of bread. And that doesn’t include all the starch/grain in beer that might have been eaten with that. With a lot of manual labor, I guess you burn all that off, but it still seems like a lot.

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