English Horse-bread, 1590?1800 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Our daily bread': history... and stories
2014
Bread is one of the most popular wheat-based foods, often considered the essence of human civilization thanks to its significance that extends beyond simple nutrition. Often called ‘the staff of life’, it is part of the world heritage as all peoples on the earth have developed specific bread-centred myths, symbols and rituals. The importance of this essential aliment is reflected in its wide variety of shapes, flavours and recipes created over 10,000 years of existence, which acknowledges bread-making as a way to retrace the lost connection with Mother Earth and provides the simple enterprise with a mythical status. The metaphysical connotation of the common food has been extensively illustrated in universal literature, from the Bible to such renowned poets as Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran and Dylan Thomas, and further on to contemporary writers like Anna Adams, Carol Rumens, Penelope Shuttle and Myra Schneider. Their lines praise the virtues of the gift of nature to humankind, the fu...
The Assize of Bread has proved to be a rich source of information for the study of this most staple of foodstuffs. The assize has been written about at great length by many authors, but most works concentrate on the socio-economic impact of the legislation rather than the bread itself. Do we actually know how a medieval loaf of bread was made? I suggest that it is by investigating and experimenting with the method of manufacturing of bread rather than concentrating on the Assize details which will lead us to a much closer understanding of the bread our forebears consumed
The Colour of Bread (West Europe, c. 1900)
The Colour of Bread, 2021
This essay takes a closer look at a pivotal moment in the history of bread when a battle raged about the colour of bread in Western Europe between 1880 and 1920. Which bread was best: white or brown? This preoccupied many people and even governments, and it was passionately debated in the press. The quarrel addressed vast issues that referred to much more than preference or taste. The colour of bread embraced agricultural output, technology, trade, production, retailing, policy, social boundaries, identity construction, health and, indeed, taste. Of course, since very long the sort of bread had been a cultural and social marker, which led to much scholarly attention about the early-modern period.In the nineteenth century, however, the mechanisation of agriculture, transport, milling and baking caused startling changes of the price and significance of bread, leading to the reversal of the customary bread hierarchy: the once elitist white bread replaced the coarser sorts for most West-Europeans in the last decade of the nineteenth century. This was a radical and sudden change that revolutionised the way people perceived bread.
The Colour of Bread in West Europe around 1900
A banchetto con gli amici. Scritti per M. Montanari, 2021
Contribution to the Festschrift for food historian Massimo Montanari. The paper investigates the transformation from unbolted wheat and maslin bread ('brown bread') to bolted and sieved wheat bread ('white bread') between c. 1880 and c.1920.
Dietary Considerations for Medieval England: A Venture into More Usual Phenomena
2017
Dietary Considerations for Medieval England: A Venture into More Usual Phenomena Kevin Roddy Continuing Lecturer Emeritus kproddy@ucdavis.edu Medieval Studies Program University of California, Davis, California 95616 For Submission to the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California March 16-18, 2017 In 1988, Christopher Dyer, one of the foremost authorities on the English medieval diet, wrote, “For generations knowledge of medieval agriculture has advanced, yet still we have hazy notions of the consumption of foodstuffs, especially by the lower ranks of society.” In the thirty years since, Dyer has still has reason to complain that, in his survey of over 500 account-books dealing with food provisions, the diets of the lower and middle classes were not well represented, and even those surviving are incomplete in important regards. In my own research into The Household Book of Dame Alice de Bryene, an early fifteenth-century compilation of one year’s daily meals in minute detail, and valuable as representing a valetudinarian with no pretenses to lavish feasts, I have found, or not found, the following in what might be thought of as quantities of standard fare: but one oblique and irrelevant reference to legumes, and none to the other contributions from her tenants or from her own putative garden, like dairy (cheese mentioned only by way of the purchase of coarse cloth for its making), eggs, vegetables (excepting onions and garlic), fruit and nuts. Perhaps satisfactory particulars—evidence of brassica, for instance—concerning these critical dietary components as they appeared among the not-so-rich will never be recovered, but in the meantime I believe that much more can be said about the circumstances surrounding both ordinary and extraordinary dining among the gentry and the peasantry as well. For example, it is a well-known fact that the English wine industry suffered a decline in the late twelfth century, as the wines of Bordeaux came into the market in greater supply. But grape vines were still grown and cultivated well into the nineteenth century and beyond, for as Bartholomeus Anglicus stated, in Trevista’s translation, “A vinyerde with grene colour and merye pleseth the sight, and is likynge to smelle with swete smellynge, and fedeth the taste with swetnusse of savour, and is plesynge to touch and to handling with softeness and smotheness of leves, and conforeth the touch ther with.” It may be in such statements that a broader, and more “plesynge” image of the ordinary medieval dietary experience can be conceived.
Food in medieval England : diet and nutrition
2006
Contents: 1. Introduction , C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, T. Waldron I: Survey of Foodstuffs: 2. The Consumption of Field Crops in Medieval England , D.J. Stone 3. Gardens and Garden Produce in Later Medieval England, C.C.Dyer 4. The Archaeology of Medieval Plant Foods, L.Moffett 5. From Cu and Sceap to Beffe and Motton: The Management, Distribution, and Consumption of Cattle and Sheep, AD 410-1550, N.J.Sykes 6. Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England, U.Albarella 7. Meat and Dairy Products in Late Medieval England , C.M. Woolgar 8. Fish Consumption in Medieval England, D.Serjeantson and C.M.Woolgar 9. Birds: Food and a Mark of Status, D.Serjeantson 10. The Consumption and Supply of Birds in Late Medieval England, D.J.Stone 11. The Impact of the Normans on Hunting Practices in England, N.J.Sykes 12. Procuring, Preparing, and Serving Venison in Late Medieval England, J.Birrell II: Studies in Diet and Nutrition: 13. Group Diets in Late Medieval England, C.M.Woolgar 14....