bunnyjadwiga

I started doing research for a library instruction session for a seminar on magic/witchcraft in whose title "medieval or modern" appeared. It turned out that modern 'witchcraft' would not be covered, but I thought I would note down the useful references I encountered on the subject here, in case I or someone else needed 'em.
( Read more... )

Waste Not, Want Not: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day, edited by C. Anne Wilson. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.)

Those who have grown bored and fretful at this stream of reviews will be pleased to know that this volume, papers from the Fourth Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions, is the last in my possession. This volume is of particular interest because most modern Americans have little idea of the preservation techniques used before the 20th, or at best the 19th, century. I certainly had only a hazy idea of drying, pickling, and the 19th century innovation of canning.
Table of Contents:

• Introduction, C. Anne Wilson
  
• Preserving Food to Preserve Live: The Response to Glut and Famine from Early times to the End of the Middle Ages, C. Anne Wilson
  
• Pots for Potting: English Pottery and its Role in Food Preservation in the Post-mediaeval Period, Peter Brears
  
• Necessities and Luxuries: Food Preservation from the Elizabethan to the Georgian Era, Jennifer Stead
  
• Industrial Food Preservation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, H.G. Muller
  
• Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Trends in Food Preserving: Frugality, Nutrition, or Luxury.
  

Wilson's work in the introduction is reassuringly solid, if dwelling a bit on the famine threat. Methods she covers include air-drying, burial (one that we usually eschew, but which did indeed work well for cereal grains under appropriate circumstances), including bog butter, salting, parching, smoking, preservation of milk and cream (we seldom think of butter and cheese as preservation methods, but they are), brine preserving, etc. There is not an in-depth description of pickling here, and lactic acid fermentation is not given much space. One thing she does highlight is that the changes wrought by 'decay,' such as lactic acid fermentation in bog butter, could turn something into what was considered a delicacy. She also points out that medieval dried fruits were considerably drier and harder than our modern jarred or plastic-containered versions and therefore could be stored in a moister environment. Wilson also places food preservation in the seasonal cycle of foods, both for peasants and the well-off.

At first glance, Brear's "Pots for Potting" sounds rather narrow in scope, but the light he sheds on potting or preserving fruits, pickled meats, fish, lard, vegetables and even grains is invaluable. It's hard for me to remember that preserves, i.e. jams, are uncommon in the medieval and Renaissance record, still more to realize that the 'more period' stoneware crock (compared to the glass jar) is not necessarily as time-honored a tradition as we may think. Brears traces the use of pots for 'potting' things back to the covered coffyns or pies of the middle ages, which were often topped up with fat after baking and used as preservation media for the fish, meat or other items inside. (I've even found references to baking herbs in a dough coffin for preservation). Admittedly, this Pots article is focusing more on the post 1600 than the pre-1600 era, but knowing what developed after our time period, at least in England, is a useful mark. Furthermore, what foodie could resist hearing about the orgins of meat- and fish-paste and their pots, or the nineteenth-century bread-storage pot?

This volume catapults Jennifer Stead firmly into the company of Wilson and Brears as food history writers for me. The only weakness in her essay is a tendency to confuse the reader as to which period is under discussion, but a reference to her footnotes, which generally are to primary sources, is all that is needed to set one straight. Again, the primary period under discussion is post-1600. Here, not only the discussions of the introduction of techniques but the scientific background and results of those techniques (such as the widespreadness of rancid butter in the 18th c.) are invaluable. In particular, I have always wondered about 15th-16th century references to gunpowder being rubbed on meat. Stead's explanation of the use of saltpetre (and its connection to nitre), salprunella and even gunpowder clears this up. She also traces the precursors to airtight 'bottling' (ie canning) of fruit from recipes in the 1600s onward.

The last two articles are definitely out of our period, but are fascinating as they remind us about the changes in the nature of food preservation even in the last century and a half. That a cake of portable soup (boiled-down broth, the precursor to the boullion cube) made in 1771 remained substantially unchanged in 1938 is one of Muller's fascinating tid-bits, as is an explanation of the spray-drying process used for dry milk and instant coffee. Hunter's article is rather harder going, especially for the reader who knows something of American cookbook/cooking history or who has wandered the pages of Cornell's HEARTH collection (http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/) The history of preserving information in Britain is much different than America's! But Hunter's analysis of when and to what class home preserving methods were advocated is enlightening for the Britophile.

All in all, perusing this collection left me with a much improved understanding of the diversity and development of food preservation. Today, in the days of the sealed can, the deep freeze, and the refrigerator, older techniques have been left behind, only revived in Camping Without a Cooler. For Food service purposes, we are wise to adhere to the 4 hours between 40 and 140 degrees rule. But it is worth knowing how those who literally could not achieve such a standard worked to preserve their food and protect it from spoilage.

Once again, I'm splashing around in a subject that interests me, and it sends sidelights on my research topics. I've ILLed every available one of the proceedings of The Leeds Symposium on Food History -- whose book The Country House Kitchen Garden I reviewed earlier.

Pamela A. Sambrook and Peter Brears, eds. The Country House Kitchen, 1650-1900: Skills and Equipment for Food and Provisioning (London: Alan Sutton, 1996).

The majority of the papers in this volume come from the eighth and ninth Leeds Symposiums on Food History, though additional papers were added to round it out. I'm going to list the contents not in order, but by contributor:

Peter Brears

The Ideal Kitchen in 1864

Behind the Green Baize Door

Kitchen Fireplaces and Stoves

The Batterie de Cuisine

The Pastry

The Bakehouse

The Dairy

C. Anne Wilson

Cooks, Kitchen-maids, and Kitchen Helpers in the Country House

Stillhouses and Stillrooms

Pamela Sambrook

Larders and other Storeplaces for the Kitchen

Supplies and Suppliers to the Country House

Household Beer and Brewing

Rob David

Ice-getting on the Country House Estate

Una A. Robertson

The Scottish Country House Kitchen

My first question is, does Peter Brears ever sleep? The man is a font of knowledge, and he not only publishes on interesting topics, he writes interestingly. C. Anne Wilson is just the same. The articles in this volume, though not being period, fill in gaps in my knowledge I sometimes didn't even know I had.

For instance, I never realized before--despite my extensive reading of early-20th and late-19th century sources-- that the original 'kitchen range' is a set of "raised iron firebaskets" for roasting. Though still I'm not entirely sure I could point out a range in the wild, Brears leaves me in no doubt about how they worked and how they developed. He is equally informative about stoves, which were originally built-in 'chafers' or 'chafing dishes' loaded with coals, above which pots could be stewed or simmered at a lower heat than over the open fire. [My brother, who works in catering, would stare to see the originals of the 'shaafers' he and his coworkers deal with.] Brears's description of the range of cooking utensils/containers (batterie de cuisine) leaves me with intriguing thoughts-- such as the lack of molds in early inventories, the identity of several strange pieces of cookware that periodically turn up at estate sales, etc. His comparison of the equipment from four inventories of the same kitchen (1632, 1764, 1869, and 1900) gives me a sense of what I might have had to work with in period compared to what I've read in Victorian novels. Brear's article about the layout of food-preparation and serving rooms is heavy going, but the endless corridors and complicated labyrinths of service mentioned in English books now makes more sense.

Of especial interest to me is C. Anne Wilson's article on Stillrooms and Stillhouses. Not only were these places-- first the domain of the lady of the house, then the housekeeper-- used to distill medicinal liquors and process herbs and other items for home medical care-- they were also used to prepare confectionery and banquetting-stuffe such as preserves and bisket-cakes. Descriptions of the stilling apparatus are here, as are some information from seventeenth-century inventories.

Most importantly, it becomes clear that the stillhouse as well as the dairy was considered a ladylike place up to the middle of the 1800s-- and so our feminine nobility of the SCA would be most likely found in these places in the kitchen. Brears quotes Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, 1595: "The kitching, buttery or pantry are not places proper for [great mens wyfes]; a dary is tolerable; for soe may yow have perhaps a dische of butter, a soft cheese, or some clouted creme in a sommer..." Knowing how to carve and mold butter was apparently a desirable professional skill for a 19th-century housekeeper, while she also controlled the confections, the pickles, the preserves-- and the waiting services of the still-room maid. The differentiation between the status of the man-cook (typical of large houses in the SCA period) and the slow introduction of women cooks and maids, the status of different types of food service workers, and the prequistes thereof, are all touched on. Yes, in our period, most women wouldn't be allowed to work in a great house kitchen-- the upper body strength needed to handle the equipment would be one deciding factor.

It had never occurred to me, until I read Brears on "The Bakehouse" that large batches of bread might be kneaded any other way than by hand. Apparently, batches of dough might be kneaded using a lever-pole apparatus, or by wrapping them in a cloth and walking on it-- certainly more efficient than individual human arms. The operation of the kneading trough is also explained, as well as questions of flour-bolting. Many of the references are from the early-to-mid seventeenth century, with a few digressions before 1600. Very useful for casting backward toward medieval baking.

I was fascinated by the ice-house article-- who knew there was once a thriving trans-Atlantic trade in ice of all things? North American ice was gradually replaced by Norwegian ice, and eventually artificial ice got the trade-- but only when the purity was guaranteed. I only knew about ice-houses from Laura Ingalls Wilder, so I had no idea that ice-getting was such a cumbersome and labor-intensive chore. Apparently, in some years in England, it was more economically feasible to buy North American or Norwegian ice than to pay employees to cut and store it.

The information on Larders is invaluable, as it suggests that efforts were made to keep such areas for food that now requires refrigeration between freezing and 50-60 degrees F. It also explains the methods used to attempt to keep this temperature; what items were kept elsewhere, specifically in the 1800s; methods of keeping meat and fish, including pickling and ice. The supplies article also gives a lists of the 'presents' from tenants at a particular hall, Christmas 1643, that might make us mutter about interesting presentations.

The Beer and Brewing article contains the best quote of all, in the discussion of restoring to working order the brewhouse at Shugborough: "The puzzle was resolved when the joiner who carried out [the display restoration] work in the '60s explained that no one had any real idea whether it should be like that, they just thought it looked good." The article focuses primarily on the evidence they found and their process of installing a (much smaller) brewing apparatus in the site to demonstrate working brewing. For brewers, it's a fascinating read.

This volume does not appear to have been as widely distributed as the Garden volume, so it's harder to get online. Still... for the historical foodie... a worthwhile purchase.

In the mainstream literature, there isn't a lot that is specifically aimed at discussing Apothecary practice, so when I saw Hugh Petrie's The Apothecaries Shop Opened and the companion volume, The Still Room Opened, published by Stuart Press, I was very excited. Admittedly, these pamphlet size works can't cover material to much depth, and they are essentially home-published'. Hugh Petrie's spelling and sometimes grammar are somewhat erratic.The hand-sketched
illustrations are usually clear and give at least as detailed an idea of what goes on, for instance in distilling, as one would find in a good period woodcut (see John French's Art of Distillation for comparision).

As overviews of 16th and 17th century apothecary practice and distillation they make a good beginning. The target audience appears to be 17th-century re-enactors and interpreters, but material from In The Apothecaries Shop does cover earlier time periods to some extent. The Still Room is a good introduction to the terminology and equipment of medieval distillation, though the author cautions that all(?) distillation is forbidden in Great Britain and should be avoided. But The Still Room helped me to understand a good many terms and descriptions I'd been struggling with. In particular, there are some practical points about distilling spice oils vs herb oils, the different 'heats' of distillation, etc. that are helpful.

The Apothecaries' Shop discusses the nature and status of apothecaries, ingredients and their background, and gives some sample ingredients and recipes. Again, this is targetted primarily to the re-enactor, so things I would consider key are left out, and modern-ish applications are emphasized. But again, a good background, with lots of specific examples. There are descriptions of various pieces of equipment and a drawing/plan of a useful druggists' cabinet as well.

My biggest quarrel with this series is one the author admits:

"Although a lot of work went into this booklet it is a summary of other peoples work. Sometimes I have included references, but mostly I simply have not had the space to credit work. I apologize in advance to those who recognize their work here but are not mentioned."

-- Petrie, The Apothecaries Shop Opened, vol. I, p. 3.

To me, I'm afraid, such an admission is tantamount to admitting plagiarism. At the very least, a lot of information in this text would be infinitely improved by some sort of references. At minimum, a bibliography for further reference would be an immense improvement.

Still, for less than $13.00 for the pair, available from Sykes Sutlering in the U.S., this was well worth my money, if only to encourage others to keep collecting information and publishing it. I'd recommend both texts for those interested in the background of our art.

Found this floating around my sent-mail box:
There is, in fact, a scholarly argument over whether stirrups were essential in the formation of the Frankish cavalry during the Carolingian period.
Information on The Stirrup Controversy can be found in several sources. The pro-necessity of Stirrups argument is advanced by, among others, Medieval Technology and Social Change, by Lynn White Jr. The contrarian view is on the Medieval Technology Pages: http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Subjects.html
I love the Medieval Technology pages, and figure them in the list of sources that I would rejoice to see cited in SCA research.

C. Ann Wilson's Food and Drink in Britain, Bridget Henisch's Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society, and Gies & Gies' Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval Castle are all easily available, valuable secondary/tertiary sources. Once you have read the texts, you can decide for yourself whether to trust them. There are other 'foundational' texts out there for many areas of study, many of which have been recently ignored as starting blocks by those rushing to the primary sources and/or the Internet.

As a Librarian who is on a lot of lists, I'm finding it increasingly frustrating to provide information on a topic when others are not remotely familiar with background reading on the period, and apparently not willing to follow up on pointers by going to look at the books. Maybe I'm burning out, or maybe it's the whole attitude adjustment thing. I don't know. But I wish people would try reading the books.