[Sca-cooks] Great Medieval Bake Off

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

A friend sent me this. It's interesting and includes an 11th century image  
of bread, which is quite rare. I did however leave two quibbles in the 
comments:  that medieval bakers certainly did NOT use cookbooks and they were 
ridden around  town for under weight bread or other frauds, not incompetence 
(which would have  kept them out of the guilds in the first place).

I'm also not sure they  had banal ovens in England or if they were (as in 
France) obligatory. But the  mention of those is really too cursory to 
respond to.
 
jC
 
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 9/2/2016 9:42:14 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
johnnae at mac.com writes:

The  folks behind the Medieval Manuscripts Blog at the British Library have 
been  busy of late.

On offer for 
"24 AUGUST 2016
The Great Medieval  Bake Off

The return of a certain baking contest to British television  screens this 
evening marks the time of year when viewers are struck by a  peculiar kind 
of ‘baking fever’. Typical symptoms include: massively  overestimating your 
own baking talents; buying and using peculiar ingredients  you would never 
usually use; and avidly discussing whose cake had more of a  ‘soggy bottom’. 
This fascination with the baking process and an enjoyment of  bread, cakes 
and pies has long been an important part of society. Baking is,  after all, 
one of the world’s oldest professions, and baking guilds were among  the 
earliest craftsmen guilds established in medieval Europe.

The high  level of skill required in the baking craft was certainly 
recognised in  medieval society. In the passage below, the Anglo-Saxon monk, 
Ælfric, implied  that everyone can cook, but it took special skills to be a baker! 
'You can  live a long time with my skills', he described a baker saying, 
'but you cannot  live well without them.'  "

http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/08/the-great-medieval-bake-off.
html

http://tinyurl.com/h5sl3an


The  other cute offering was the Medieval Pokeman Go edition.
"It is  traditionally thought that Pikachu, Squirtle and their comrades 
originated in  Japan in the 1990s. However, revolutionary research by the 
Medieval  Manuscripts section has unearthed some familiar scenes among the 
British  Library's  collections."

http://tinyurl.com/jqgee4e

Johnnae
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