>>Hello!
About Europe being divided into butter and olive oil eaters... I think it may not be that simple... The Catalan/Spanish Corpus of recipes, for example, seems to favour pig fat and only uses olive oil sparingly, mostly for lenten or Friday versions of dishes (when no animal fats could be eaten).

Thanks for this thread - it's been very interesting. I loved the story about grocery-shopping dog, in particular.

Cheers!

Marianne<<

Hi Marianne,

I don't know much about medieval Iberian cooking, so I'd be interested to know how the economics of this would work.

You can get butter from a cow for years, you can get olive oil from an olive tree for even longer, but you only get fat from a pig once. You have to keep raising new pigs to keep your supplies up. In northern Europe, meat was not generally a staple like it is today. For example, Henry V's common soldiers were only promised meat three times a week plus feast days. Most of the medieval cookbooks I've seen (and I'm not claiming to be an expert by any means) feature aristocratic, feast-day recipes, because that's what survives in the literature. The common diet was quite different.

For example, in the Netherlands during the middle ages, there wasn't actually a meal that corresponds to our modern breakfast. Most folks would eat bread and butter in the mid-morning. In Italy they would eat bread and oil. Was there anything like that in the penisula?

As an aside on breakfast food, drinking milk was considered unhealthy in the Netherlands and it was recommended to rinse your mouth out with honey if you had.

Best Regards,

Finally, ethnography makes me doubt the claim of the universality of olive oil/butter. A pig does produce quite a lot of fat and many humble dishes would probably be of the sort "vegetables with some bits of pancetta". Pigs can be fed easily by families that lack the pasture needed for cows, yet live in areas where olives aren't grown either. I'm talking of the whole northwest of Spain, for example. Olives aren't grown there and cows only in certain areas. I'd say that probably a mixture of fats would be eaten there.

Finally, Nola's cookbook wasn't just a palace cookbook, but got printed rather successfully in the 16th c. in both Castillian and Catalan It explains simple fare such as "fried eggs" and actually had a chapter advising frugality and not spending your whole income on looking rich. So while it probably doesn't reflect what the poorest ate, it'd not be limited to palace kitchens, either.

I admit I don't have enough to actually prove that lard was actually the most used fat in some areas, but I think there's reason enough to be sceptical of sweeping generalizations, too.

Regarding milk... Nola seems to ignore cows completely... usually it's sheep or goat's milk that is mentioned, and even then he often suggest almond milk as an alternative.
Of course, a goat would be an excellent source of milk in most of Spain, as it can feed on what a cow would starve on. Its milk could also be eaten as cured or fresh cheese (often used in the aformentioned "frying pan fruits"). Nola also places high value on ram's meat, for reasons unknown to me, as it's not a popular meat at all nowadays. And oddly enough this is reflected in the Granada market prices, where invariably ram seems to be more expensive than beef and pork (but less expensive than kid goat). So I get the feeling that Nola isn't really that odd a source, at least for lower nobility and higher middle class. But then, poor people who can't afford fatty pork probably wouldn't be able to import butter or olive oil, either.

Cheers!

Marianne

By good luck I had dinner last night with a friend who is a culinary historian and he explained a lot about lard-based cooking that I didn't know.

First off he explained how you can make a tasty spread for bread out of pig fat by leaving the cracklings in. Gives it a bacon flavor. (He actually rattled off a bunch of recipes for a wide variety of things which I couldn't begin to remember off the top of my head. Only the cracklings stuck in my brain. )

Secondly we had a long discussion about medieval ways of raising animals for slaughter. Pigs are a relatively easy animal to raise free roaming.

Then we got into the whole mutton thing. In Northern Europe, mutton was a very common meat. The real problem you have with medieval meat animals is that they were much smaller than what we are used to today. The Spanish army in the Netherland kept records of the dead weight of animals slaughtered between c. 1570 and 1580, so we have some good data for that. Sheep are in the 20 to 30 lbs range. Bullocks are in the 250 to 300 lbs range. That army issued 1 pound of meat per man per day. Now at approx. 30,000 men, it was gigantic by medieval standards, but if you do the math for a more typical medieval army of say 6,000 men you still need 240 sheep or 22 bullocks per day. You should include at least half again as many non-combatants for the logistics tail and that puts you at 360 sheep or 33 bullocks per day. (A table of dead weights of slaughtered animals can be found in the notes of Geoffrey Parkers' "The Military Revolution" or in his "The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659.")

It's interesting that the Spanish army in the Netherlands doesn't list pigs in their records.

Then we had a long discussion about storage techniques. Greek and Roman methods of air-tight storage weren't practiced in the middle ages, but you can still store solid animal fat for long periods of time in casks or tubs with only the part directly exposed to the air going bad.

Anyway, it was a very interesting discussion about something I hadn't heard about before. Thank you very much for bringing it up.

By the way, our hostess for the evening grew up on a dairy farm and she cracked us up by telling us about how daylight savings time confuses milk cows.

Best Regards,

You're lucky indeed!

The crackling bread sounds yummy...

And yes... many pigs would have been often free-roaming... Supposedly that's why you don't get proper all-pink pigs being common until recently, I've read. Apparently some intermixing with wild boar would be common enough to keep the breeds dark-coloured.
I've heard of some villages still keeping a free-roaming pig, whom everyone feeds. Once a year they have a draw and someone wins a pig.
Also, it's very easy to keep a pig in a small vegetable plot. You can then feed it all kinds of vegetable refuse. And you can pretty much eat everything from a pig - very economical!

The army data is fascinating. And one pound per man per day seems quite generous! Possibly it just didn't happen when things got long-winded or complicated??

Pigs don't quite seem so portable... as sheep or cows/bulls. Maybe that was why the army didn't use them?

And no wonder cows are confused by daylights savings time. I am too!

Great conversation - I've enjoyed it!

Cheers!

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That's interesting. There is a Brueghel etching in the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam of the Fair at Hoboken done c. 1559 that show whole families of pigs running loose -- right in the middle of an archery range!

There is an on-line copy at http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/bytype/prints/brueghel/00013.html

(For folks not familiar with the area, Kampen is in the provence of Overijssel in the Netherlands, and Hoboken is a suburb of Antwerp in what used to be part of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and is now part of Belgium.)

By the way, I looked at your website and your Burgundian company of ordonnance looks awesome. Wish we had sites like that to play in here in the US.

Regards,

Thanks for the compliments on the CdO. Yes, we are very lucky to have the Archeon and some castles like Loevenstein to play at now and then. It makes the picture so complete.

Btw, Antwerp was never part of the United Provinces. After the Union of Utrecht document was signed by a.o. Brabant (duchy in which Antwerp was situated) in 1579, in which the northern principalities turned away from their monarch Philips II of Spain, Spanish troops conquered Antwerp in 1585. It was three years after that, 1588, that the remaining revolting principalities up north declared independence with the foundation of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (nowadays Netherlands, excluding Limburg).

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quote:

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Originally posted by Bertus:
Btw, Antwerp was never part of the United Provinces. After the Union of Utrecht document was signed by a.o. Brabant (duchy in which Antwerp was situated) in 1579, in which the northern principalities turned away from their monarch Philips II of Spain, Spanish troops conquered Antwerp in 1585. It was three years after that, 1588, that the remaining revolting principalities up north declared independence with the foundation of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (nowadays Netherlands, excluding Limburg).

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Hi Bertus,

That was a typo, I meant to say United Kingdom, not United Provinces. I was thinking 19th century and typing 16th century. Too many centuries, not enough time. It was an irrelevancy anyway since the United Kingdom doesn't reflect a political unit from either our period of discussion (14th and 15th century) or today. Sorry.

Eyeballing a map it looks like Kampen is roughly 250 km northeast of Antwerp.

Regards,