06-04-2004, 09:52 PM
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Good King Henry and other 'odd' herbs
The message
from (Nick Maclaren) contains these words:
| IMHO, there's a lot of urban myth-making and falsification of the
| historical record where herbs are concerned. Just take a look at
| a copy of the original Mrs. Beeton and you'll see that most herbs
| are rarely mentioned, if at all.
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| Perhaps what's happened is that famine and poverty foods have
| been mistaken for everyday foods. Certainly, here in the Pacific
| Northwest the Indians were often reduced to dire straits by late
| winter when the previous summer's stash had been consumed and
| would end up eating, inter alia, the young shoots of thimbleberry
| (Rubus parviflorus) for lack of anything better.
No, I don't think that's it. Mrs Beeton was an upper-middle class
urban writer in the Victorian era, and a lot of the remarks are
referring to what the rural peasantry did before the industrial
revolution. VERY different. Remember that large-scale vegetable
farming and long-distance transport were already well established
by Mrs Beeton's time.
I don't think many, if any of the recipes in 'Mrs. Beeton' were written
by her. Her husband was a magazine publisher, and he invited
contributions, many - possibly all - he published untested under his
wife's name.
It is surmised that there was a sort-of competition amongst some
contributors to see who could get the most outrageous recipe published.
Indeed, some of the recipes in the boot are reported not to work at all.
In the 15th century, for example, spices were EXPENSIVE and so the
poorer people used them sparingly. Hence herbs would have been of
more interest for flavouring. Similarly, the foods you would grow
in a vegetable patch if you could not buy any imported foods are
very different from those you grow for shipping into a city and
selling wholesale.
There were plenty of sources of herbs - most monastries had extensive
herb gardens, as did a lot of manor houses and other large
establishments but how many were commonly available I don't know.
There were plenty of wild plants which may have been quite widely
cultivated - ground elder, which was introduced by the Romans and later
cultivated by the monastries (and nowadays is almost exclusively found
near places of ancient habitations), lovage, bur chervil, wild celery,
whorled caraway and tuberous caraway, and other umbelliferae, garlic
mustard, ransomes, crow garlic, wild leel, sand leek, the cresses,
mustard, flower scents (rose, etc), tansy, chamomile, liquorice, various
mints, thymes, clary, and lots more that I can't think of just now. At
least some of these would have been used by a good proportion of the
people.
There is very little written about how the common people cooked,
which doesn't help :-( Try and find anything written about how
the poorer people (or even somewhat richer people in poorer areas)
cookec in even 1950, for example, and it's hard. Try for 1850,
and it's diabolical. Try for 1750, and it's almost impossible.
And so on ....
Hmmm. I have recipe books dating from the 1950s, and the 1940s - though
the latter was full of ways of cooking to make the most of your food
ration.
There are good fish recipes in the Compleat Angler, and I could give you
a madiæval recipe for stuffed swan, though this was hardly a recipe of
hoi polloi.
I think that if you are prepared to dig in the right places (Dr.
Johnson?) you might find more than you expect.
--
Rusty
Open the creaking gate to make a horrid.squeak, then lower the foobar.
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/
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