[Sca-cooks] Period Feasts, bread, butter

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

Pain de bouche or (in England) pain de Mayne. Typically round and about a  
pound in size, of the whitest bread then available.
 
The word "roll" by the way developed in English as a way to refer to these  
small "rolled" balls of bread and came to mean any finer bread. Leading to 
the  sometimes confusing usage in nineteenth century English of "roll" to 
refer to  long French breads. But as a practical matter to our minds the old 
better breads  WOULD have been rolls. In France, it was only about the 
eighteenth, maybe the  end of the seventeenth, century that it began to become 
common for good bread to  weigh about four pounds.
 
These are the breads (sometimes round, sometimes in hemispheres) you see in 
 numerous medieval images of feasts.
 
The trencher wasn't really treated as a bread; a trencher in fact could be  
made of metal. It's a corruption of the word "tranchoir" from "trancher" 
(to  slice) and could be any surface used to slice food. Note by the way that 
bread  trenchers are only referenced for two, maybe three hundred years. It 
is very  unlikely that Charlemagne or even Hugues Capet used trenchers.
 
Jim  Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/) 

FRENCH BREAD HISTORY:  Seventeenth century bread
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2016/02/french-food-history-seventeenth-century
.html






In a message dated 10/4/2016 3:49:41 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
stefanlirous at gmail.com writes:

If they  were using trenchers, were separate bread or rolls  served?