On 6 Apr 2004 07:36:05 GMT, Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article , lid (Rodger Whitlock) writes:

| 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.
|
| 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.

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 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 ....

I suspect you might find the nitty-gritty on these matters in
travelogues written by visitors from *other* countries. "You
wouldn't believe what the English peasantry eats!" iow.

At any rate, if I can be allowed to slightly reformulate my
hypothesis, evidence is very scanty and many modern books on the
subject of Herbes in Ye Olden Dayes may contain more imagination
than fact.


--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
[change "atlantic" to "pacific" and
"invalid" to "net" to reply by email]