butter-msg – 5/31/20

Period butter. Making butter. Butter churns.

NOTE: See also these files: dairy-prod-msg, Honey-Butter-art, cheese-msg, cheesemaking-msg, Cheese-Making-art, cheesecake-msg, fresh-cheeses-msg, spreads-msg, flavord-butrs-msg.

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    Mark S. Harris                  AKA:  THLord Stefan li Rous
                                          Stefan at florilegium.org
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Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
From: DDFr at Midway.UChicago.edu (David Friedman)
Subject: Re: Mongolian Cuisine (HELP!)
Organization: University of Chicago Law School
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 13:59:20 GMT

> Just checking;  Ghee is a type of clarified butter?
> 
> Marian, Clann Kyle

Ghee is clarified butter; I do not know if there are any other kinds of
clarified butter that are not ghee. It is available from Indian grocery
stores, and Indian cookbooks generally have instructions for making it.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
DDFr at Midway.UChicago.Edu


From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 23:16:13 -0400
Subject: Re: SC - butter

Mark Harris wrote:
> I remember some arguments in previous years on whether "honey butter" was
> period at all. If even "herb butter" and butter were not period, what was
> eaten on bread? Anything?

Honey butter is probably a German invention, popularized mostly by the
"Pennsylvania Dutch", who are of German origin. I couldn't say when,
but I remember reading some period (or just post-period) traveller's
comment on the English diet: his comment was that less butter was eaten
in England than on the Continent, and that it was not eaten on bread in
the Flemish fashion.

I do know that some period recipes call for white grease (rendered lard
or suet) to be dissolved into pottages, and butter could have been a
non-meat-day substitute in many cases. Toward the very end of our
period, many English recipes called for a knob of butter to be beaten
(emulsified) into sauces, in a technique very similar to modern recipes
for French butter sauces like Beurre Blanc and Bearnaise sauce.
Generally it would thicken the sauce just a bit, but more importantly
would help suspend various things floating in watery liquids, so thinner
sauces wouldn't settle out at service.   
> 
> Stefan li Rous
> markh at risc.sps.mot.com

Adamantius


From: gfrose at cotton.vislab.olemiss.edu (Terry Nutter)
Date: Sun, 18 May 1997 02:41:00 -0500
Subject: Re: SC - butter

Hi, Katerine here.  Over the years, I've been working on a project on the use
of various ingredients in 13th to 15th C English cuisine, as reflected by
the surviving recipe corpus.  My numbers are complete relative to the 13th and
14th centuries (not much of a trick for the 13th), though I'm nowhere near
done with the 15th.  For the curious, the total number of recipes involved
in the current figures are 26 13th C recipes, 419 14th C ones, and 907 15th
C ones.

Of these recipes, butter occurs in 15% of the 13th C recipes, and in 3% of 
the 14th and again 3% of the 15th.  3% isn't a lot; but it's as many as, say,
pears and shellfish show up in, and more than cheese, peas, venison, kid,
or rice (comparisons from the 15th C).  Other forms of fat are far more common;
recipes include oil or grease six times as frequently.  Still, it was hardly
unknown.

I do agree with the original claim, however, that it does not appear to have
been much used as a preservative in meat pies.  Meat pies do not frequently
appear to have be used as preservation techniques; for fish, galentine 
(in gelled form) appears to have been used more often.

Cheers,
- -- Katerine/Terry


From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
Date: Sun, 18 May 1997 22:50:18 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: SC - butter

At 4:47 PM -0500 5/17/97, Mark Harris wrote:
>On Friday, May 16, Lord Ras said:

>I agree that there are recipes that are LATE period that call for butter and
>even very RARELY a mid-period recipe lists "boter" as an ingredient. However,
>butter was not NORMALLY consumed. It was considered medicinal (to cover
>wounds, salve base, etc.) until rather recent times. Whish IMHO puts it in
>the same category as potatos, tomatos and other late period dietary
>introductions.

The 13th c. Andalusian recipes use both butter and clarified butter. Le
Menagier fries in lard and butter (Cress in Lent with Milk of Almonds).
Platina greases the pan for armored turnips with butter or liquamen (animal
fat, not the Roman liquamen), Proper Newe Book uses butter, _Curye on
Inglysch_ uses it in an emberday vergion of Sawgeat and in Malaches Whyte,
_Ancient Cookery_ in tart in ember day, ...

So much from a quick search of the _Miscellany_. I don't know what you
count as a "mid-period" recipe--if that includes _Curye_ and _Le Menagier_,
then what do you classify as early period?

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


From: Stephen Bloch <sbloch at adl15.adelphi.edu>
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 15:58:24 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: SC - butter

Stefan li Rous writes:

> It was my understanding that butter was eaten by the lower classes but not
> by the upper but I don't have referances to back this up. Anyone else know?
> Lord Ras, is it possible that the sources you have been looking at are
> primarily just for the upper class and thus would miss the use of butter by
> other classes in/on food?
> 
> I remember some arguments in previous years on whether "honey butter" was
> period at all. If even "herb butter" and butter were not period, what was
> eaten on bread? Anything?

From the 13th-century Arabo-Andalusian "Manuscrito Anonimo", a chapter
entitled "The Customs that Many People Follow in Their Countries":
	...  Many people eat butter, and add it to bread, while others
	cannot bear to smell it, much less to eat it....

The same source includes numerous recipes calling for butter.  In
particular, a variety of pastries called by the general term "rafis"
(e.g. musahada, markaba, muqawwara, et multae cetera) seem to be topped
with a mixture of melted butter and honey, as often as not poured into a
hole poked in the pastry (although I haven't seen any reference to
mixing honey and butter at room temperature, or allowing the mixture to
cool to room temperature before use, as seems common at SCA feasts).
Butter also appears in Arabo-Andalusian sources in making pie crusts,
again in making puff pastry, and often as a lubricant in meat dish.

What the barbarians beyond the Pyrenees do with butter is their
problem. :-)
					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University


From: Uduido at aol.com
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 22:28:45 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: SC - Butter-oops

In a message dated 97-05-19 03:07:37 EDT, you write:

<< The 13th c. Andalusian recipes use both butter and clarified butter.
...<snip many other wonderful words>>>

I looked up recipes that called for butter and found a few. However, my
original intent was to say that butter was not usually consumed by the
nobility.

"In Medieval Europe, butter was plentiful, so it was viewed as fit only for
poor folk to eat.....[from 'Rich Man, Poor Man, Butter Man...';The Great Food
Almanac (A Feast of Facts From A to Z); Irene Chalmers; pg. 169; pub.
Collins; c. 1994]

Since SCA personas are not considered peasantry ,  it was my reasoning that
personas of our type would have rarely consumed butter and it would have
rarely reared it's head on the Feast table of any self-respecting nobleman.
it is still my opinion that bread would have been "spread" with the much
tastier olive oil. In fact, I'm on a quest to find the info on this
particular subject. "Bread and butter" is a common item in the Current Middle
Ages, agreed. So are chickens. But chickens were not a "common" food
during the Middle Ages and I have run across no primary references citing the
existence of "bread and butter". It is also my contention that bread was
almost universally dipped in broths,etc. (e.g. "sops") thus negating the
widespread use of any spread being necessary. I would welcome any further
thoughts or info in this area.

Yours in Service to the Dream,
Lord Ras (uduido at aol.com)


From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 23:55:48 -0400
Subject: Re: SC - Butter-oops

Uduido at aol.com wrote:

> personas of our type would have rarely consumed butter and it would have
> rarely reared it's head on the Feast table of any self-respecting nobleman.
> it is still my opinion that bread would have been "spread" with the much
> tastier olive oil. In fact, I'm mon a quest to find the info on this
> particular subject.

This situation may have something in common with the recent
fish-outside-of-Lent thread. I suspect one possibility might be that
butter is something that the lower classes would have eaten whenever
possible, while the rich, feeling that they had to resort to it on fish
and/or fast days, might conceivably avoid it on those days when things
like "greasy seme" of meat might be available. Certainly several recipes
call for butter to be included, possibly as a substitute for other oils
or fats. Sawgeat and Hanoney come to mind, both of which are egg dishes,
which COULD indicate that these are non-meat-day dishes (at least
sawgeat, when butter is used instead of sausage, falls into this
category).  

 "Bread and butter" is a common item in the Current Middle
> Ages, agreed. So aren't chickens . But chickens were not a "common" food
> during the Middle Ages and I have run across no primary references citing the
> existence of "bread and butter". It is also my contention that bread was
> almost universally dipped in broths,etc. (e.g. "sops") thus negating the
> widespread use of any spread being necessary.

One possibility (if remote) is that spreading bread with a topping might
be something that was done, not while at a feast day table, but rather,
say, on a hunting trip. (Or possibly, while gambling all night long ; 
)  ) I believe the original Welsh dish of toasted cheese (not the effete
Digby version, but the real thing, being merely good fat cheese roasted
before the fire in slices) was served on toasted bread. Whether this was
then eaten out of hand I don't know.

> I would welcome any further tho'ts or info in this area.

Ol' sieve-head is at it again. I can't place the reference; I just read
this a couple of weeks ago. I believe it was part of an Englishman's
account of life in a Heugenot village in southern England, and it makes
a reference to certain alien habits of the folk of the village: among
them was the habit of giving the children bread smeared thickly with raw
butter in the Flemish fashion.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Adamantius


From: nancy <nweders at mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 07:59:29 +0000
Subject: SC - butter

While a late source, The Good Huswifes Jewell, (2 parts, by Thomas
Dawson, published by Walter J. Johnson, Inc. Theatrum Obis Terrarum,Ltd,
Norwood, New Jersey, 1977) lists two "menus" for fish days that have
Butter as the first item served.  It also contains a recipe for almond
butter, and a great many recipes list butter as an ingredient.  Many of
the meat pies have butter as a liner for the pastry sort of preventing
the juices from leaking through.  This is very late in the span that the
SCA uses but it does show how much butter was used in the late period. 
	It would be interesting in tracing the development of the use of butter
as an ingredient or actually an ingredient.
	The Good Huswife's jewel also has a recipe that contains potatoes in it
as well.  The recipe includes dates, sugar and red wine.....

Clare


From: gfrose at cotton.vislab.olemiss.edu (Terry Nutter)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 11:44:53 -0500
Subject: Re:  SC - Butter-oops

Hi, Katerine here.  Lord Ras writes:

>I looked up recipes that called for butter and found a few. However, my
>original intent was to say that butter was not usually consumed by the
>nobility.
>
>"In Medieval Europe, butter was plentiful, so it was viewed as fit only for
>poor folk to eat.....[from 'Rich Man, Poor Man, Butter Man...';The Great Food
>Almanac (A Feast of Facts From A to Z); Irene Chalmers; pg. 169; pub.
>Collins; c. 1994]

It's wise to take any statement as sweeping as this with a grain (and
sometimes a pillar) of salt.  Attitudes toward butter seem to be strongly
conditioned by time and place.  As a very broad generalization, outside
of the Islamic world, southern Europe seems to have preferred olive oil,
while northern Europe preferred meat fats -- either butter or white
grease.  Olive oil is mentioned in 13th to 15th century English cuisine,
but less often than butter, and many many times less often than grease.

Meat fats were used for two general kinds of purposes: to raise the fat 
content of a dish, and to fry in.  For frying, northern Europeans seem 
overwhelmingly to have preferred white grease to butter.  This may be 
strongly influenced by the fact that butter (unless it has been clarified, 
a technique mentioned commonly in Spanish and Islamic sources but not 
elsewhere) burns at far lower temperatures than grease.  Butter also was
not used to lard meats for spit roasting, very likely for the same reason.

For increasing fat content, butter does not seem to have been all that
strongly dispreferred to grease in those areas that prefer meat fats.

>it is still my opinion that bread would have been "spread" with the much
>tastier olive oil. 

This is very plausible for Italy and southern France, but relatively
unlikely for northern France, England, Germany, and northern Europe in
general. 

>"Bread and butter" is a common item in the Current Middle
>Ages, agreed. So aren't chickens . But chickens were not a "common" food
>during the Middle Ages 

Do you mean that chickens were not eaten by peasants, or that they were not
common in upper class cuisine?  The first, I have little information on;
but the second is patently false.  Chicken is the single most common form
of flesh in 13th to 15th century English recipes; the only thing that comes
close to rivaling it is pork.  It is almost two and a half times as common
as beef (including veal), and on the order of ten times as common as
deer.  

For details, see http://www.watervalley.net/users/jtn/Articles/game.html.

>It is also my contention that bread was
>almost universally dipped in broths,etc. (e.g. "sops") thus negating the
>widespread use of any spread being necessary. I would welcome any further
>tho'ts or info in this area.

Period serving manuals indicate that tables were set with large amounts
of bread completely apart from trenchers, and that bread was always on
the table with cheese and fruit before the first course arrived.  This
would tend to go against your contention.  There are recipes for sops,
but they are not all that common; and while it is highly probable that
bread was dipped in other broths and sauces, we have no evidence
that it was *only* used so, and considerable reason to doubt it.  On
the other hand, the same serving manuals make no mention of putting 
butter on the table (or olive oil); which suggests that neither was it
spread with substances of that kind, at least much of the time.

Cheers,
- -- Katerine/Terry


From: gfrose at cotton.vislab.olemiss.edu (Terry Nutter)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 11:53:53 -0500
Subject: Re: SC - Butter-oops

Hi, Katerine here.  Adamantius writes,

>This situation may have something in common with the recent
>fish-outside-of-Lent thread. I suspect one possibility might be that
>butter is something that the lower classes would have eaten whenever
>possible, while the rich, feeling that they had to resort to it on fish
>and/or fast days, might conceivably avoid it on those days when things
>like "greasy seme" of meat might be available. Certainly several recipes
>call for butter to be included, possibly as a substitute for other oils
>or fats. Sawgeat and Hanoney come to mind, both of which are egg dishes,
>which COULD indicate that these are non-meat-day dishes (at least
>sawgeat, when butter is used instead of sausage, falls into this
>category).  

Butter is explicitly suggested as an Ember Day alternative to sausage.
Ember Days are not fish days.  They are specific dieting days that are
less restricted, but that still do not permit flesh.  (Ember days are
also relatively rare; twelve in a year, as I recall.)

I'm not certain that butter was permitted on fish days.  I don't recall
it offhand in any fish dishes through the 15th century.  I do, however,
know of recipes that include both butter and marrow.  If you can use
marrow, you can use white grease (that is, if the religious dietary
restrictions permit the first, they also permit the second).

Butter occurs in custardy dishes reasonably often.  Grease does not.
The strong implication is that it was preferred in those dishes.

Cheers,
- -- Katerine/Terry


From: gfrose at cotton.vislab.olemiss.edu (Terry Nutter)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 11:58:34 -0500
Subject: Re:  SC - butter

Hi, Katerine here.  Clare writes:

>It [Dawson] also contains a recipe for almond
>butter

There are at least six recipes for almond butter extant from the 14th and
15th centuries in England.  However, there is no evidence that it was used 
as a spread.  It seems to have been served sliced as a dish.

Cheers,
- -- Katerine/Terry


From: "Sue Wensel" <swensel at brandegee.lm.com>
Date: 20 May 1997 13:38:52 -0500
Subject: Re(2):  SC - butter

Markham has a recipe for roasted butter.  Basically you beat some eggs and
sugar (I think) into some butter, dredge it, and roast it.  While you roast
it, you need to keep dredging it.  Markham says it was very popular.

Derdriu
swensel at brandegee.lm.com


From: "Sue Wensel" <swensel at brandegee.lm.com>
Date: 20 May 1997 15:42:53 -0500
Subject: Re(2): Re(2):  SC - butter

> > Markham has a recipe for roasted butter.  Basically you beat some eggs and
> > sugar (I think) into some butter, dredge it, and roast it.  While you roast
> > it, you need to keep dredging it.  Markham says it was very popular.
> > 
> > Derdriu
> > swensel at brandegee.lm.com

> Okay, I'll show my ignorance here.  What does "dredge" mean in this context?
> I know about "dredging in flour" and such, but this doesn't appear to be the
> same thing.
> 
> Gunthar

From what I can make out of his recipe (I left my book at home, and I am at
work), you roll the butter in the dredging (I think it was crumbs) and spoon
more on as the butter comes out through the dredging until no more butter
comes through.

Derdriu
swensel at brandegee.lm.com


From: "Sue Wensel" <swensel at brandegee.lm.com>
Date: 21 May 1997 09:15:07 -0500
Subject: Re: SC - Roasted Butter

I haven't done a redaction yet, because people start muttering phrases like
needing artery drain-o, short lifespans, etc.

Here it is:

To roast a pound of butter well 
(The English Housewife; Gervase Markham, edited by Michael Best 1986)

To roast a pound of butter curiously and well, you shall take a pound of seet
butter and beat it stiff with sugar, and the yolks of eggs; then clap it
roundwise about a pit, and lay it before a soft fire, and presently drdge it
with the dredging before appointed for the pig; then as it warmeth or melteth,
so apply it with dredgining till the butter be overcomed and no more will melt
to fall from it, then roast it brown, and so draw it, and servie it out, the
dish being as neatly trimmed with sugar as may be.


The dredging mentioned in the previous recipe is fine bread crumbs, currants,
sugar, and salt.

I think I just might do this sometime and serve it to people and not let them
know what they are having until after they have ingested the "cholesterol
poison."

Derdriu


From: mjbr at tdk.dk (Michael Bradford)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 08:53:32 GMT
Organization: Tele Denmark

ms224245 at mindspring.COM (Patricia M. Hefner) wrote:

>Is butter as we know it--made out of cow's milk--period? If so, how was it
>made? I vaguely remember a butter-churn that had been used by one of my
>great-grandmothers. It was a great big wooden barrel. I think they poured
>the cream into it after they'd separated it from the milk, but I have no
>idea how this was done. I don't know what they did in the churn, either!! I
>was born a little too late to see butter being churned! My mother told me
>that they also used the churn to make ice cream before it became
>mass-produced. Does anybody know anything else about earlier dairy
>production? Merci beaucoup!

As I remember, cream can be separated from milk by letting the milk
stand and after a while, skimming the cream off.

When the cream is churned, it is beaten by the motion of the paddlle.
Last year for a seminar on cooking in the viking period (which my
group were teaching), we took cream and whipped it in a bowl with a
bundle of twigs (which we had bought at an old building museum and
were sold for this purpose) and after a while, you have butter. Just
add a little salt for taste.

Michael Bradford
Viking Group Wunjo
Denmark

mjbr at tdk.dk


From: troy at asan.com (Philip W. Troy)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 10:05:49 -0400

In article <5t15cg$22e$1 at gatekeeeper.teledanmark.dk>, mjbr at tdk.dk (Michael
Bradford) wrote:

> As I remember, cream can be separated from milk by letting the milk
> stand and after a while, skimming the cream off.
> 
> When the cream is churned, it is beaten by the motion of the paddlle.
> Last year for a seminar on cooking in the viking period (which my
> group were teaching), we took cream and whipped it in a bowl with a
> bundle of twigs (which we had bought at an old building museum and
> were sold for this purpose) and after a while, you have butter. Just
> add a little salt for taste.

I remember reading somewhere that the plunger-style butter churn is of
comparatively recent development. Somewhere (I'll have to go through a
stack of papers to find it) I have a photocopy of [a facsimile edition of]
a 16th-century English dairy manual. IIRC, it describes a process where
the dairymaid pours milk into shallow bowls, allows the cream to rise, and
beats it with her hands, gathering up lumps of butter as they form,
pushing it together into a ball. I'll see if I can find this reference.

For what it's worth, there is little evidence to suggest that butter was
widely eaten on bread in period Europe. More often it would have been
stirred into pottages to enrich them (generally on meatless days), but
also might have been eaten with a spoon like a soft cheese. It also
apparently shows up frequently in Anglo-Saxon medical receipts, I believe
being used as a way to gently dehydrate and concentrate herbs by boiling
them in butter.

There are English accounts of those wacky Heugenots eating their butter
spread on bread in the odd Flemish fashion...

Adamantius


From: XSimmons <"jls9" at  MSG.TI.COM>
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 12:11:38 -0500

Michael Bradford wrote:

> ms224245 at mindspring.COM (Patricia M. Hefner) wrote:
> >Is butter as we know it--made out of cow's milk--period?
>
> <snip of good way to separate cream>
> Last year for a seminar on cooking in the viking period (which my
> group were teaching), we took cream and whipped it in a bowl with a
> bundle of twigs (which we had bought at an old building museum and
> were sold for this purpose) and after a while, you have butter. Just
> add a little salt for taste.

Know what you can make from all that skimmed milk, after you've
separated off the cream?  Cottage cheese!  ("Yum, yum," cried all the
dieters.)

Just for grins, cottage cheese is also period.  Curds [14c] and whey
[before 12c] (solids and liquid) form in the cheese-making process,
which generally involves enzymes from a calf's stomach.  (Still like
rennet custard, regardless of the origin of the rennet!)

Curds are rich in casein, a protein that also helped make milk-paint
work (and is now used in making plastics.) Whey is high in lactose,
vitamins, and minerals, and contains some fat.  Perhaps that is why
curds and whey are mentioned as food for children.  (Imagine having
cottage cheese for breakfast, instead of "frosty choco-nut sugar crunch
bomb" cereals!)

Ly Meara al-Isfahani (who likes her curds and whey with cinnamon and
honey)


Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 12:42:19 -0500
From: bgarwoo <lordberwyn at ibm.net>
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?

> Ly Meara al-Isfahani (who likes her curds and whey with cinnamon and
> honey)

Strictly speaking, cottage cheese is not the same as curds and whey. 
The whey is washed off, and the curds are mixed with cream or milk.

berwyn


From: Chris Mayer <csminter at hickory.net>
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 15:09:22 -0400
Organization: CSM International

Daniel W. Butler-Ehle wrote:
> Isabelle de Foix wrote:
> : Is butter as we know it--made out of cow's milk--period? If so, how was it

> As far as cow's milk goes, I don't know. It seems to me that goat
> butter would have been more likely in Europe for most of the
> period, but that's just a guess.
> 
> Ulfin the Dashing

        Sorry, no, you can't make butter out of goat's milk, because you 
can't get it to separate into cream.  The fat globules are different, 
much smaller, as I recall, which is why it is more easily digested.  
Poor people often don't have butter, because all they can afford is 
goats (they can, however, have cheese).  Cows, and butter indicate more 
wealth.
                                        Julitta


From: hrjones at uclink.berkeley.edu (Heather Rose Jones)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: butter in period?
Date: 18 Aug 1997 18:38:13 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley

Daniel W. Butler-Ehle (dwbutler at mtu.edu) wrote:
: Isabelle de Foix wrote:
: : Is butter as we know it--made out of cow's milk--period? If so, how was it
: : made? 

Some of the earliest surviving references to butter (and the earliest by a
cognate of that word in particular) occur in classical Greek sources --
where the word is quite recognizable in the form "boutyron"  -- although a
variety of references from both Greek and Latin sources make it clear that
butter was not a normal part of their diet. (Quite likely because of its
limited shelf-life in warm climates.) The word "boutyron"  literally means
"cow-curds" or "cow-cheese", which suggests that the Greeks were coining a
word for some unfamiliar substance based on more familiar ones. (There are
two parts to the implication: butter was unfamiliar to them, and they
didn't normally make cheese from cow's milk.)  As Grant notes (in
"Anthimus: De observatione ciborum") some researchers have suggested that
the Greek term is a translation of a Scythian word. 

Pliny mentions butter as a medicine, rather than a food, and gives
instructions for churning it in his "Natural History" (28.133-5), but
Dioscorides (in "On Medical Substances" 2.72.2) mentions it as a
substitute for oil in cooking. Anthimus himself, writing in the 6th
century, but from the Mediterranean culinary tradition, echoes Pliny in
suggesting butter as medicine rather than food (although one must remember
that the line between the two is rarely clear in period writings), and
specifically notes honey-butter as a remedy for consumption! ("Si puro et
recenti et mel modicum admixtum fuerit..."; "the butter should be blended
with a little honey".)

Evidently there are references in Hittite inscriptions that have been
interpreted as referring to butter, but I don't have any specific
citations available.

Since the question had to do with the antiquity of butter, I'll skip going
into the multitude of later medieval references.

: : mass-produced. Does anybody know anything else about earlier dairy
: : production? Merci beaucoup!

I know there are a number of 16th century (as early 17th c.) English
publications on the proper ordering of a dairy that go into great detail.
See, for example, Gervase Markham's "The English Housewife", which
describes the production and processing of butter in almost excruciating
detail. I'm sure that similar material from other cultures is available,
although I don't know that this genre of writing is found before the 16th
c.

: As far as cow's milk goes, I don't know. It seems to me that goat 
: butter would have been more likely in Europe for most of the 
: period, but that's just a guess.

I'm curious why you suppose this should be -- have you seen references to
goat butter? Two points argue against it, one linguistic and one
practical. As noted above, the word "butter" makes specific reference to
cows -- which doesn't mean that the word couldn't be more broadly applied,
but it does indicate that cow's butter is the basic application. Secondly,
goat's milk is much less inclined to separate (i.e., have the cream rise)
than cow's milk is -- and churning whole milk to produce butter would be
rather impractical.

Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn


From: albinsal at pilot.msu.EDU (Sally V Albin)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Goat Butter
Date: 18 Aug 1997 20:07:16 -0400

Sorry, but yes you can make butter from goat's milk.  Yes, goat's milk is
naturally homogenized so you do have to wait longer and you do get less cream
per milk from just letting it set.  In modern times, we have cream separators
to pull it out, but if you let it set in a cool place for a day, you will get
enough cream off to make a reasonable amount of butter.  My family used to
raise goats.  We had milk, butter, yogurt, and if mother'd had as much time and
money as enthusiasm, we'd have had cheese as well.

Beth


Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 09:31:24 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - drawn butter?

Mark Harris wrote:
> What is drawn butter?

All right. In the "Everything Most People Never Wanted to Know
Department", I have my Official Drawn Butter Dissertation, which
actually may come in handy for some. (Hah!)  ;  )

Okay. Things that are, in archaic versions of English, drawn, are mostly
either eviscerated, which isn't an issue here, or made thick in some
way, which is. Examples are the instructions to draw up a thick almond
milk, or to draw something through a streynour, which more often than
not means to force the item through a strainer to puree it and thereby
make it smooth mixture, rather than lumps and water.

Butter is an emulsion, a perfect mixture of an oil and water, which
under normal circumstances don't want to mix. In this case, they do
anyway. When you melt butter, it becomes a relatively thin liquid, and
the emulsion "breaks" apart into its two parts again, which is why you
can skim the clear butterfat off the top, and leave the rest behind, and
it is this clarified butterfat that is what most modern people think of
as drawn butter (which, by the way, is NOT the same thing as the ghee
used in Indian and Midle Eastern cookery, but don't get me started).

In [late] period cookery parlance butter would have been "drawn" by
melting it VERY slowly and on a very gentle heat, like in a double
boiler or some such, with another liquid, beating it as it melts. So you
find sauces made from things like the vinegar that a fish was marinated
in, with butter melted into it and whipped to form a relatively thick,
creamy sauce, along the lines of modern beurre blanc or hollandaise.
Yummers.

Sauces like that are still made today on the Continent, especially in
France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In England, however, somebody
conceived the idea that drawn butter should be made by making a roux
thickener of cooked flour and butter, turn that into a sauce by adding
water or vinegar or a mixture, or ale, or SOMETHING, and simmering it
for a bit, and then adding more butter, this time beating it in in the
traditional way. I don't know if this was developed by someone who felt
that the starch of the roux would keep the sauce more stable (so it
wouldn't break or de-emulsify on high heat), or if the issue was
expense, with flour and water taking the place of some of the butter, or
if they thought that simple butter beaten into a flavorful liquid was
just too rich, or what. In any case, flour-thickened drawn butter sauces
appear to have originated in England in the late eighteenth, early
nineteenth centuries. In spite of the fact that the sauce in the packet
of Lipton Rice or Noodles In Sauce is more or less made this way, with
dried butter solids and Wondra or some other pre-cooked flour stuff,
it's still a perfectly viable sauce. I like mine on peas, with a tiny
pinch of sugar and some chopped mint. (And STILL Lady Aoife thinks I
don't give English cooking a fair break! ;  )   ) Some people like it on
Lutefisk, which is how we got on this topic in the first place, IIRC.

But, drawing butter up with a small amount of just water , or vinegar,
or some other watery liquid is still alive and well (in dishes like REAL
fettucine Alfredo, f'rinstance), just as it would have been done in
period. At least in late period, anyway.

Adamantius


Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 12:51:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mark Schuldenfrei <schuldy at abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>
Subject: Re: SC - drawn butter?

  What is drawn butter?

It's butter, gently heated to melt, and with the solids removed.  It's the
lovely golden butter served alongside shellfish.  My online dictionary says:

drawn butter noun
Melted butter, often seasoned and used as a sauce.
[drawn, past participle of DRAW, to bring to a proper consistency
(obsolete).]

	Tibor


Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 09:47:40 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - drawn butter?

Mark Schuldenfrei wrote:
> Butter is not just oil and water (technically, fats and water), but it also
> has lots of milk proteins in it.

I spoke in generalization. Sorry. You're right, butter has water, fats,
lots of sugar, and some proteins.

  Ghee is the coagulated protein, and it
> part of what makes Indian food so darned yummy.

That's something I wasn't aware of. I understood ghee to be the "mostly
butterfat" phase of the melted liquid, but the proteins should be living
in with the other milk solids, down at the bottom, with a lot of water
in the case of ordinary clarified butter, and as a somewhat caramelized
sediment in the case of ghee. But with ghee, you filter the sediment
out. It may have other culinary uses (would be great kneaded into
chapatti or poori dough).

> This is also how you should make drawn butter today.  Gently (oh, so gently)
> heat it so that it slowly melts, and keep stirring it so the part most
> exposed to heat does not brown.  Not that brown butter isn't also a yummy
> treat (because it is) but because it isn't drawn butter.

The difference, though, is that period drawn butter is not separated,
but rather encouraged to remain a thick emulsion after other stuff (even
if only water) is added. The drawn butter you get with lobster is more
like standard French clarified butter: melted, allowed to separate, and
either chilled and removed as a solid mass for remelting, or skimmed
free of foam, and then skimmed off the top of the milky stuff at the
bottom. Personally I love a good drawn butter with scallions and whisky
on crab, but lobster will do in (ahem) a pinch.
> 
>                           In any case, flour-thickened drawn butter sauces
>   appear to have originated in England in the late eighteenth, early
>   nineteenth centuries.
> 
> Interesting.  I was under the impression it came from France.  (And I've
> always wondered if it came from Rouen... :-)  What leads you to the opposite
> conclusion (France and England being culinary opposites.  :-)  I admit, my
> post period cookery knowledge is weak until we hit this century.

Only the available recipes I've seen, which in England very frequently
use a small amount of flour-and-butter thickener with stock or water,
and then have some butter beaten into that. French recipes tend to
thicken other stuff with various starches (although even that is going
out of fashion to a large extent), but butter sauces, with only a very
few exceptions, are primarily thickened only by the power of
emulsifiers, either the relatively weak ones found in butter itself, or
by adding egg yolks, which are full of lecithin.
 
>         Tibor (Back when I ate like a man, I truly ate!)

Adamantius


Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 11:54:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mark Schuldenfrei <schuldy at abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>
Subject: Re: SC - drawn butter?

    Ghee is the coagulated protein, and it
  > part of what makes Indian food so darned yummy.
  
  That's something I wasn't aware of. I understood ghee to be the "mostly
  butterfat" phase of the melted liquid, but the proteins should be living
  in with the other milk solids, down at the bottom, with a lot of water
  in the case of ordinary clarified butter, and as a somewhat caramelized
  sediment in the case of ghee. But with ghee, you filter the sediment
  out. It may have other culinary uses (would be great kneaded into
  chapatti or poori dough).

You understood differently, because I mis-remembered.  Ghee is drawn butter,
not the solids.  Sigh.  I hate brain failure.

	Tibor


Date: Sun, 14 Dec 97 03:58:16 PST
From: "Alderton, Philippa" <phlip at morganco.net>
Subject: Re: SC - Greetings!

<snip>
In the meantime, all ghee is, is butter
which has been melted and poured off gently so that the milk solids are
left behind, kind of the reverse of what you do when you're defatting gravy
when you don't have time to chill and reheat. With ghee, you want the pure
fat- the milk solids will spoil if kept unrefrigerated, but ghee won't. If
you're in a hurry for something which does need to be refrigerated anyway,
or will be eaten quickly, regular butter will do.

Phlip


Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 18:01:52 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Ghee (Clarified butter)

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> Phlip described how to make it, but I have never been happy with my
> results. On the other hand, I can buy it in the supermarket - it is very
> common in Indian cooking.

The problem you may be encountering is the fact that ghee _isn't_ just
clarified butter in the ordinary European sense of the word. Clarified
butter is butter that has been melted until the emulsion breaks, causing
the fat to rise to the top, so it can be skimmed. Ghee is made by
cooking the butter, slowly, until the water has evaporated almost
completely, and the milk solids have settled to the bottom and begun to
caramelize, giving a slightly caramelized flavor and color to the
butterfat.

But yes, you can buy ghee in various markets, except I had understood
the commercial product was a vegetable product, kinda like clarified
oleomargarine. The real thing may well be available, but I haven't seen
it myself. At least I don't recall it if I did.

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 6 Feb 98 16:57:18 -0500
From: Dottie Elliott <macdj at onr.com>
Subject: Re: SC - butter

>For the event I am cooking, I want to make herbed butter and/or honey
>butter.  Where can I find a recipe?

I have no documentation for herb or honey butter.  However, I recently
discovered that garlic, rosemary and a little oregano mixed in with
softened butter are wonderful.

Clarissa


Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 19:44:06 -0800
From: "Anne-Marie Rousseau" <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC - butter

> Has anyone come up with any evidence that honey butter was served in
> period? The one reference I have come across was medical and very early
> (6th c.). Does anyone have period references to herb butters?
>
> David/Cariadoc

The only hint of honey butter I can find is the picture of the guy in
Platina (Platina? One of those Italian sources) standing at a tall churn,
making leche miel, whatever that is. At least that's what the caption
underneath the guy says. Could be interpreted as "sweet butter", or "honey
butter".

- --Anne-Marie


Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 16:25:29 EDT
From: Mordonna22 at aol.com
Subject: SC - butter making clarificatoin

hmmm
To clarify my earlier post on butter making:

Tools needed:
1 butter churn (an urn of wood or ceramics or fired pottery to hold 1 1/2 to
2 gallons) with a lid with a hole in the middle.

1 butter dasher (a cross shaped paddle affixed to the end of a  stick that
will fit through the hole in the lid)

You will also need un-homogenized, high butterfat milk, or heavy cream.  You
should allow it to sit out at room temperature overnight to separate and sour
just a bit.  Skim the cream from the milk and refrigerate the skimmed milk to
use or drink.  Pour the cream into the churn and churn with a slow steady beat
until the butter begins to rise to the top and there are yellow flakes of
butter on the handle of the dasher.  Remove the butter from the buttermilk by
either sieving through cheesecloth or by hand by squeezing the butter
particles in the milk until it begins to form a cake.  Pat into a cake or
press into a mold.  If you wish to salt it add the salt now and squeeze it
through the cake before you mold it.  Keep refrigerated and use within two
weeks or until it grows hair, whichever comes first.  It freezes quite nicely
and will keep for an unlimited time.  Reserve and refrigerate the buttermilk
for making scones, biscuits, and cornbread.

To make a small amount, you can put 1 pint un-homogenized heavy cream into a 1
quart canning jar, allow to sit several hours at room temperature, then gently
ROLL the jar steadily until the butter forms.

By the way, clarifying butter is something else again.  To clarify real butter
you place over very low heat until it is separates into a clear liquid and a
cloudy liquid, skim off the clear liquid, this is clarified butter.  Here in
The Valley of the Sun, we just sit it outside for a half hour or so.

Mordonna


Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 20:59:58 -0700
From: "Anne-Marie Rousseau" <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC -Making Butter in Period

Hiya from Anne-Marie
we are asked:
>How was butter made in period?  I would like to have a childrens
> activity of making butter at the upcoming A&S.  I made butter at my
> grandma's knee in a pickle jar.  Shook that thing for a long time.

we have pictures of women standing at large wooden churns, (15-16th
century) and we have pictures of men in Scappis woodcuts, in a kitchen,
making "miel dulce", again standing at a large wooden churn. May describes
the role of the dairy, but doesnt mention butter making that I recall
(mostly being concerned with cheese). Le Menagier cautions that if one buys
milk from the milk maid, to be sure that she has not diluted it with water,
for that makes it go bad faster. Chiquart mentions buying cheese and other
dairy products, not producing them himself.

From this, I assume that dairying was done, for the most part, in larger
urban households by dairy oriented people. The pictures show butter being
made the same way it was for generations, in large standing wooden churns
(no doubt coopered). I have yet to find a real, functional wooden butter
churn, but have seen ceramic ones that looked like wood, if you can justify
going that way. Alternately, in my food and eating classes, I'll often do
the jar method just so they can do it while I lecture and then eat it on
fresh baked bread. yum!

If anyone knows of a source for REAL functional butter churns (most
homesteaders use the eggbeater ones nowadays, or at least that's what WE
had when I was a kid), let me know!
- --AM


Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 21:07:14 -0700
From: "Anne-Marie Rousseau" <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC -Making Butter in Period

hey all from Anne-Marie
we are asked:
>  A consideration... could we still use this techique with cream that is
> available today? Most commercial cream is ultra-homoginized and this could 
> make it difficult to use this process. I guess if unhomoginized cream or milk 
> is available, this process could be used.

Butter making does not depend on the "separation" that homogenization
prohibits. You won’t get cream to the top, but if you start with regular old
grocery store whipping cream, you can make some amazing butter. I do this
for my food and eating class I teach. Pass around the fruit jar (with a
tight lid) and by the end of the lecture, we have butter. I wash it and
salt it in a large bowl of ice water, and then we eat it with bread I
brough that contains funky old world flours (pea, chestnut, etc).

Folks were most amazed that the "buttermilk" we got off the butter was
nothing like the sour cultured stuff they buy in the store.

- --AM


Date: Mon, 03 Aug 1998 13:07:50 -0400
From: Phil & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC -Making Butter in Period

Deborah J Hammons wrote:
> For those of you who are stuck at home during Pennsic, I have a question.
>  How was butter made in period?  I would like to have a childrens
> activity of making butter at the upcoming A&S.  I made butter at my
> grandma's knee in a pickle jar.  Shook that thing for a long time.

I recall having read (probably in C. Anne Wilson's "Food and Drink in Britain")
that butter was traditionally made in period Britain in wide bowls, with the
dairy maids leaving the night-time milk to cool and sour slightly overnight. In
the morning they would work the milk with their hands, using the heat from
their fingers and the coolness of the settled milk to cause the butter to
separate from the milk and rise to the top, where it could be pushed together
into lumps and lifted out.

I have since seen a 16th century English text on dairy husbandry (I have it
lying around somewhere in photocopy form) which pretty well confirms this. I
believe the text is written by the son of a Suffolk dairy maid, who basically
says he used to watch his mum and the other dairy maids at their work all
through his childhood. There's a fair amount about cheese in this, too.

Adamantius


Date: Mon, 03 Aug 1998 14:37:18 -0400
From: Nick Sasso <Njs at mccalla.com>
Subject: Blender Butter (was  Re: SC -Making Butter in Period)

I have made butter in very slow speed food processor with children as
scince experiment (with the plastic paddles).  Also with a blender on
lowest speed.  You have to keep a close eye on it though. When it
starts to go, it fgoes fast, and can eat up your motor if done too long.
I'm thinking about trying it with my Heavy Duty Kitchenaide with wire
whisk.

niccolo


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 14:06:46 +0000
From: Erin Kenny <Erin.Kenny at sofkin.ca>
Subject: SC - Butter churns

For those who are looking for REAL USABLE butter churns take a look
at:
  https://www.lehmans.com/
where I found this lovely churn.

Redwood Cylinder Churn                         $125.00
Cylinder design dates from the turn of the century and was considered
a modern innovation at the time. Hardwood double dasher removable
for cleaning, heavy steel handle, lifetime stainless steel hoops and wood
drainplug. Holds 3 gal, churns up to  2 gal. 13 OD x14 1/4 H, 13 lbs.
Amish-made in the USA.

Claricia Nyetgale
 who thinks this is making butter churning sound distinctly more
interesting.


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 17:14:30 -0400
From: "Alma Johnson" <chickengoddess at mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Butter churns

>For those who are looking for REAL USABLE butter churns take a look
>at:
>  https://www.lehmans.com/
>where I found this lovely churn.

>Redwood Cylinder Churn                         $125.00

Wow, thatsa lotta money for butter!!!!!

May I suggest a old fashioned southern pottery churn?  I just found one
locally to Atlanta, 5 gal capacity, $39.95 plus tax, 1 gal goes for $19.95
plus.  Other sized in between priced in between as well.  There are a few
smaller ones left, and I'd be happy to take orders and ship'em out to folks.
Make your own dasher and lid out of wood and save considerable cash.

Availability is iffy if you want a 5 gal,(it may take some time) , but
e-mail me and we'll look into it.

Rhiannon Cathaoir-mor


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:10:01 -0400
From: "Alma Johnson" <chickengoddess at mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Butter churns

>dear lady can you describe these crocks, please...shape, etc
>
>Dragonfyr

Ooh, description.  Depends on the capaciity, to some degree.  I will
describe a large one, and make it more squat looking for the churns of
smaller capacity. Tall pottery jar with two handles, smaller at base,
flaring wider toward the top, and then back smaller at the top, with an
internal lip to hold a lid.  The lid (Some come with a ceramic lid) has a
hole in it for the dasher handle.  If you have the first foxfire book, mine
looks just like the one in the photo of the old lady churning in her
kitchen.  That's probably a 5 gallon one like mine in the picture, and mine
is the only one I saw today made of the local red clay with a brown glaze.
Mine stands about 17" high and has a circumference about the widest part of
36".  Churns, as you can imagine, don't move off the shelves like they used
to, but the gentleman at the pottery assured me that they carry a few at all
times.  I'm not certain how long it will take for them to get in another 5
gal, but they are all nice.  Some don't come with a lid, which is only there
to protect you from splashing the clabbered milk all over, but a round of
wood with a hole in the middle will work, and dashers are just a dowel
handle with 2 crossed pieces of wood on the end for agitation.

Rhiannon Cathaoir-mor
Who wil probably sit her churn next to the computer - type with the right
hand, churn with the left!


Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 12:49:19 -0400
From: "Gaylin Walli" <g.walli at infoengine.com>
Subject: SC - So I made butter

After all the butter discussions that went on during our
stay at War, I was dying to try this butter making thing.
I read through all the posts and figured it couldn't be
that complicated. It wasn't. I hope more people try this
because I got at least two good nights of footrubs out
of this (yeah, footrubs, that's it, yeah) from my husband
who was so impressed that it could be done.

I tried it two ways and in both cases used a standard
local heavy cream that was ultra pasteurized and sold
in the dairy section of our mid-sized grocery store.

Version #1: Into a full quart narrow-mouthed mason jar I
placed 2 pints of ultra-pasteurized heavy cream. I set
this on the countertop uncovered.

Version #2: Into the bowl of my Kitchen Aid mixer with
the paddle (not the whisk) installed, I placed the same
amount and let it sit uncovered.

Then I went about my morning business and washed dishes
and generally cleaned the house. An hour or two later I
remember both of the cream concoctions and started the
mixer up on the lowest speed. I covered the mason jar
with a standard lid and ring. I promptly ignored the
mixer and went into the living room and started reading
a magazine. During my reading I gently rocked the jar
back and forth from hand to hand without shaking it.

Company arrived and I forgot about the mixer again.
About 30-45 minutes after that, one of my guests noticed
a "lapping water" sound much like you would here at
the seashore. Wahlah! Butter happened when I wasn't
looking! Lovely stuff. Pale, pale yellow and tasty.

As for the jar, well, after another 45 minutes of gentle
rocking, I determined it needed something more vigorous
and ended up rolling it with my feet on the floor
because my arms got tired. The foot method worked, but
to be honest, it took a hell of a long time. I lost
track after 3 hours of non-consistent rolling. Again,
it was tasty stuff, though it seemed a bit more
watery than the butter from the mixing bowl.

Either way, it was very nice. I might just volunteer
this stuff for a small feast (like the test feast for
an upcoming event or something). Thanks for all
the talk. It was a lovely little experiment!

Jasmine

Jasmine de Cordoba, Midrealm (Metro-Detroit area of Michigan)
jasmine at infoengine.com or g.walli at infoengine.com


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 07:05:46 EDT
From: WOLFMOMSCA at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC -Making Butter in Period

Once upon a time in the East, I was cooking feast (as usual, back then) which
called for whipped cream on whatever dessert I was making.  Of course, it was
July.  In Virginia.  And I was young and really believed I could accomplish
hand-whipped cream.  In July.  In Virginia.  Silly me.

I took all the precautions I'd learned at my mother's knee.  Cold cream.
Metal bowl nested in another bowl filled with ice.  I whipped and I whipped
and I whipped in vain.  When it started to look a lot like whipped butter, I
changed the menu.  No whipped cream for dessert, but they got handmade whipped
garlic butter for the bread.

Wolfmother


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 07:15:09 EDT
From: WOLFMOMSCA at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC -Making Butter in Period

For real wooden butter churns, try the Cumberland General Store in Tennessee.
Lots of old-time stuff, including cast iron cookware and horse harnesses.

Here's the catalog order info.

Cumberland General Store
#1 Highway 68
Crossville, TN 38555

1-800-334-4640

I checked the alphabetical list of products.  Wood Churns are listed, as well
as hand-crank churns.  Happy shopping.

Wolfmother


Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 09:13:21 -0400
From: Nick Sasso <Njs at mccalla.com>
Subject: SC - Churn from Cumberland not the ticket, maybe

As you see below, this is a decorative piece, but may have value if
brewers' pitch is added.  I cannot judge the sturdiness, but it may be
worth calling and asking about.

http://www.cumberlandgeneral.com/

niccolo

                                Pine Churn

                     This Pine Churn has three oak bands and
                     stands 17" tall.
                     Shipped Weight of 11 lbs. Decorative Use
                     Only.
                     #1568...................$59.95


Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 20:07:08 -0500 (CDT)
From: jeffrey stewart heilveil <heilveil at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: SC - So I made butter

When I was making butter with campers, we usually put an agitator in the
jar to speed up the process.  A marble or the like.

Bogdan


Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 13:55:30 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - butter - salted/unsalted

>   <snip> Did they salt butter in period?  <snip> Caitlen Ruadh

My apologies; I seem to have missed this the first time around. Yes, they did salt butter in period, both as a way to preserve it for later use, and also because it allowed for different medical properties from unsalted butter.

I believe there are instructions in Le Menagier de Paris, as well as other sources that I'd have to search through, for removing the salt from butter.

Adamantius


Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 22:35:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Carol Thomas <scbooks at neca.com>
To: sca-arts at raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Illustration on Medieval Butter Churn

_Renaissance Recipes_ has a painting detail with a butter churn right in the
middle.  It is 15th c., I believe
Lady Carllein


Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 10:37:49 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Definitely OT: Ghee and Bamboo steamers

LadyVXN at aol.com wrote:
> Ghee is clarified butter. It's a Middle Eastern condiment - you'll usually
> find it used in Asian Indian cooking. Get some good Indian cookbooks - my 2
> favorites are Curried Flavors (can't remember the author right now - I'm in
> the midst of moving and my cookbooks are packed), and a vegetarian cookbook by
> Madhur Jaffrey. The Jaffrey book covers the whole East - Japan, Korea,
> Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Persia, etc., and the Arab Middle East.

As far as uses go, I'm inclined to agree, but ghee is not simply
clarified butter, although clarified butter makes a decent substitute.
European clarified butter is made by melting the butter until it breaks
and settles, the foamy top is skimmed away, and the pure butterfat is
ladelled off the top of the water and milk solids at the bottom. Ghee is
cooked slowly, and for a rather long time, until the water has simmered
away, and the butterfat has begun to brown a bit, and the milk solids
have just begun to caramelize. This is why ghee is now mostly prepared
as a commercial product. Making your own is still better, especially now
that many commercial ghees are now made like margarine, from vegetable oil.

Adamantius
Østgardr, East


Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 22:02:46 EST
From: LrdRas at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC - Butter?

MGroulx at NRCan.gc.ca writes:
<< I don't get it? Is there something wrong with amercian butter? Btw,
butter is freezable.

 Micaylah >>

In a nut shell, yes. Most butter available in the USA is the disgusting stuff
labeled 'sweet creamery butter'. This is made from fresh cream as opposed to
slightly fermented cream.

Leaving the butter cream set out over night to sour is how butter was
originally made until the dairy industry decided it 'saves' time to do it the
other way. The resulting 'sweet butter' product is for the most part tasteless
when compared to butter made in the traditional way. Thankfully, there are
some states where butter can be gotten that is still made the 'right' way.
West Virginia is one of them and I always stock up on butter when I go to WV.
Another good source for good butter is the Amish.

Ras


Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 21:38:45 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Price of butter

Marilyn Traber wrote, re margarine:
> a purified and chemically altered form of vegetable oil modified to be lightly
> yellow with a flavor reminiscent of butter.
>
> http://www.margarine.org/homepage.html
>
> margali

Originally an emulsion made from refined beef tallow, a bit of water,
and dried milk solids, invented during the Napoleonic wars as a food
with a somewhat longer shelf-life than real butter. Oleo, because it was
made from fat, and margarine, because its surface was vaguely "pearlescent".

G. Tacitus "Everything You Never Wanted To Know" Adamantius
Østgardr, East


Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 16:28:21 EST
From: <Bjmikita at aol.com>
To: sca-arts at raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Churning butter

Here's how my grandmother made butter.  Get whole milk, the more butterfat the
better.  You'll have to find raw milk, that's milk not pasturized.  If it's
pasturized it usually has all the butterfat removed, or at least enough so
making butter either won't work or will take forever.  Let it sit in the
refrigerator or on cabinet in a cool kitchen overnight.  The butterfat will
rise to the surface.  Scoop it off, put in refrigerator.  wait another couple
of hours and sometimes you can get more butterfat come to the top.  The
butterfat is what you put in your churn.  Clean the churn really well before
you add the butterfat.  Then it just takes time and muscle.  Churn evenly and
continuely until it turns to butter.  After it makes butter the liquid left
in the churn is buttermilk.  Real buttermilk.  After you take the butter out,
rinse it off, shape it the way you want it.  while you are shaping add salt
if you want it.  I may have left out a step or two, but that is the basics.

Jeanne de La Mer


Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 14:45:01 -0700
From: Curtis & Mary <ladymari at cybertrails.com>
To: sca-arts at raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Churning butter

> I have a butter churn that I purchased at Estrella War last year.
> However, I do not know the recipe/steps for churning butter and would
> like to use my churn at the War this year.  Can someone give me some
> tips/instruction?  Thanks.

You can use pure, real cream from the grocery or skim the cream yourself
from fresh raw milk.  Store bought cream will have been pasturized, and
since unripened or not soured cream butter is pretty blah, you might want
to let it sour a bit.  Raw cream will usually sour with the correct
bacteria if allowed to stand overnight, but pasturized cream should have
a spoonful of cultured buttermilk added, then allowed to stand
overnight.  Cream to be churned should have a temperature of about 60
degrees F.  If it's too warm it'll be soft greasy butter and not keep
well. If too cold it will take forever to get the butter to come {that is
for the butterfat globules to seperate from the liguid}  Churn
vigerously, after a bit you will hear and feel the difference in the
liguid. Churn a bit longer and check to see what you've got. When you
have lots of tiny granules of butter [and it'll be anywhere from bright
yellow/orange to almost white} floating in the buttermilk, which will now
look thin and watery instead of thick and creamy, strain off the butter.
Save the buttermilk for cooking, baking and drinking, and rinse the bits
of butter well in cold water.  Then press the granules of butter in to a
cake for storage {they used to make fancy butter molds for this step}  i
don't remember now, off hand how much cream it takes for a pound of
butter, but I'm thinking it may run along the same lines as pounds of
cheese from milk, which is 1 gallon whole milk = 1 pound cheese, so a
gallon of cream may give you a pound of butter, but like I said it's been
a long time and I've forgotten.

Mairi Broder


Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 19:07:58 -0500
From: snowfire at mail.snet.net
Subject: Re: SC -  "bog butter"

- -Poster: Jean Holtom <Snowfire at mail.snet.net>

 From the Book "Food and Cooking in Prehistoric Britain: History and
Recipes"

The following is a passage about the way butter was probably made in
prehistoric times.  It is noted that this method was used until recently in
the Orkney Islands.

"The milk was left to stand in the churn for 2 - 3 days until it thickened
naturally.  When the butter was slow in coming some red hot "Kirnin' stones
were thrown in to help the separation process.  When the butter had gathered
at the top it was lifted out into an earthenware dish and washed several times
in cold water to remove any remaining milk, which could turn it sour quickly.
It then had to be de-haired by passing a knife through it several times to
remove any animal hairs on the knife edge.  In many part of Britain it was the
custom to bury the butter in wooden vessels or baskets, or occasionally in
cloth, bark, or leather containers, in peat bogs.  Many discoveries of this
"bog butter" have been made...."

Has anyone heard of this before?

Elysant


Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 19:41:02 EST
From: Mordonna22 at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC -  "bog butter"

snowfire at mail.snet.net writes:
> It then had to be de-haired by passing a knife through it several times to
>  remove any animal hairs on the knife edge.

I've milked many a dairy beast by hand.  If the udder is washed competently
first, and the milking done properly, there shouldn't be any hair in the milk.
Now don't tell me our Medieval cousins, or even our Prehistoric cousins, or
our relatives in the Orkneys who do this all the time don't know how it's
done.  Sounds like the "researcher" is making it up as he/she goes along, or
reporting on the results of his/her own amateur experiments.  Besides that,
the easier way to remove hair from butter would be to strain the milk
through a "faire cloth" before allowing the butter to form.

Mordonna


Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 02:36:05 -0000
From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?=" <nannar at isholf.is>
Subject: Re: SC -  "bog butter"

Jean Holtom <Snowfire at mail.snet.net wrote:
>"The milk was left to stand in the churn for 2 - 3 days until it thickened
>naturally.  When the butter was slow in coming some red hot "Kirnin' stones
>were thrown in to help the separation process.  When the butter had gathered
>at the top it was lifted out into an earthenware dish and washed several times
>in cold water to remove any remaining milk, which could turn it sour quickly.
>It then had to be de-haired by passing a knife through it several times to
>remove any animal hairs on the knife edge.

Probably correct. I think I´ve seen something similar in Icelandic texts and
there are several references in old sources to the fact that Icelandic
butter frequently was rather hairy. And completely unsalted, even though it
was being kept for months, even years. Despite this, my ancestors consumed
several pounds of butter each week.

Extremely poor people, who had no cow and only got a few litres of milk per
day during the summer from their ewes, would sometimes collect each days
milk into a barrel for many weeks, then churn the sour milk in the autumn.

The butter was usually kept in wooden chests or barrels, or in leather
containers, but always indoors, not buried in the ground out of doors
(possibly half buried into the floor sometimes, as barrels used for curds
(skyr) and fermented whey (s‡ra) frequently were.

Nanna


Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:02:19 -0500
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC -  "bog butter"

> It then had to be de-haired by passing a knife through it several times to
> remove any animal hairs on the knife edge.  In many part of Britain it was the
> custom to bury the butter in wooden vessels or baskets, or occasionally in
> cloth, bark, or leather containers, in peat bogs.  Many discoveries of this
> "bog butter" have been made...."
>
> Has anyone heard of this before?

Yes, I've heard of it before. A couple of comments:

1) The fact that butter has been found in bogs doesn't prove burying it
in bogs was a typical thing to do with butter. Many bog bodies have been
found; it wasn't something that was done to everyone. The reason for
doing so seems to be pretty unclear, but possibilities might include
some kind of sacrifice, an attempt to preserve the butter in a cool,
relatively airless place, and an attempt to preserve the butter with
various chemicals the bog water has in solution (tannic acid for one).
The butter may have been believed to have (and may have, in fact)
undergone some kind of chemical change making it medicinally useful.
Centuries later, many European recipe books for medicines and foods
would speak of May butter, which appears to be butter that has been left
in a sunny meadow for several days, in May. The modern explanation seems
to be that some vitamin is either created or stored in the butter upon
exposure to sunlight (I forget which).

2) Highland Scottish cattle breeds (such as one would find in the
Orkneys) were and are generally rather long-haired.

Adamantius


Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 00:30:01 -0000
From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?=" <nannar at isholf.is>
Subject: Re: SC -  "bog butter"

>I thought I was the only one questioning the hair in the butter.  I have had
>dairy goat herds in the past and have never had a problem with hair in the
>milk. Just wash the udders properly and strain the milk before you make butter
>or cheese. Your milk is free of any imperfections. I can't imagine anyone not
>being clever enough to figure this out for themselves.

I´ve no idea how clever the old Icelanders were. What I know is they had to
keep - and milk - their cows in cramped, windowless, dark, stuffy hovels
made of stone and sod, lit only by by meagre and flickering tallow or fish
liver oil lanterns. And the shaggy, long-haired ewes were milked out in the
fields in all kinds of weather, often far from any source of water (I can
personally attest to the fact that you can´t handle Icelandic sheep, in
early summer at least, when they are shedding their old coat of wool,
without wool hairs clinging to everything, in particular to your hands). I
believe most people strained their milk through horsehair sieves, but they
seem not to have caught everything. And some were too poor to afford even
such a basic utensil. But given the general low standards of cleanliness and
hygiene of my countrymen at the time (commented upon by European visitors
from the 16th century onwards), I´d say a few hairs in the butter would have
been the least of their worries.

Nanna


Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 22:09:52 -0700
From: Anne-Marie Rousseau <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC - It's Butter.....Parkay

hi all from Anne-Marie
Aislinn asks:
>I have heard that butter was used by the lower classes as a substitute for
>refined lard which was used by the higher class. It was also mentioned this
>was because "in order to get refined lard you had to slaughter the animal
>whereas the poor could not afford to slaughter their livestock."
>
>If this being the case at what time was butter first introduced, and in what
>cultures. Was it as now as we often purchase it, plain .... or was it as with
>many different varieties (having several spices added it to it for different
>taste). If that being the case where can one obtain copies of the different
>recipes for butter? That is if there are any.

Interesting...I had never head that! All I know is what I've gleaned from
reading medieval cookbooks and shopping lists, etc.

- --butter is sometimes given as a substitute for lard, especially when they
give alternatives for fast days. If you suppose that the cookbooks are for
"rich" people only, than that suggests that rich folks used butter as well
as poor folks.
- --butter was bought from dairymaids and is mentioned in other medieval
shopping lists (check out le Menagier and Chiquart, for example)
- --I have never seen an example of butter flavored with other things in
medieval cookbooks, though something tickles the back of brain...some
superlate recipe using sage??? Digby?
- --to get butter, you need milk, and you need to take it away from a baby
animal (albeit there's sometimes a surplus). Also, it means you can’t make a
super rich cheese that you could sell to some rich sap), so the idea that
butter is poor folks fat might not hold true...
- --the poor ate meat too, at least according to the agricultural treatises
of the time, they just ate it more seasonally than their bourgois
counterparts. Especially pigs, which were raised for the sole purpose of
slaughtering for meat (and the lard obtained therein), so it makes sense
that anyone who had a pig to slaughter would have lard (according to the
household records of the 15th century, most peasants had at least a pig or
two)
- --you get butter when you have milk, ie in the late spring/summer and maybe
fall when the cow is fresh. You get lard when you slaughter a pig (or
tallow from a sheep, etc), ie the fall. It makes sense  that the fat used
would be that which was seasonally available. Butter doesn’t keep as well as
lard, in my experience, and both will go bad eventually.

I'd really be interested in seeing real medieval recipes for butter...all
I've found is pictures of people churning it...
- --Anne-Marie, who's 15th century re-enactment group often churns their own
butter (and then uses it cooking. oh darn! :))


Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 02:41:37 -0500
From: Helen <helen at directlink.net>
Subject: SC - butter?

Is this true?  Is it this easy?

Making Butter

Buy heavy cream. Put it in a jar and shake for a very very long time.
It will eventually become butter. (Alternately, you can use a food
processor to speed up the process.) After you have little lumps and
flakes of butter, you must "wash" it. Drain the liquid (save it for
making cream based soups!) And mold the butter into a lump. Under cold
running water, knead it gently for 5 minutes (I fold, press flat, fold,
press flat, etc). Add salt, if desired (I don't), knead it in to
distribute it evenly. Mold, then refrigerate.


Date: Mon, 12 Jul 99 07:29:42 -0500 (CDT)
From: Debra Poole <dpoole1 at airmail.net>
Subject: Re: SC - butter?

>Making Butter
>           Buy heavy cream. Put it in a jar and shake for a very very long
>  time.  It will eventually become butter.

   A hint to speed up the process if you do not have a food processor, add
two clean marbles to the jar.  This will cut the time almost in half.
   I have made butter like this and children are a great help when it comes
to shaking the jar.  We use an old clean peanut butter jar and roll it back
and forth to each other on the kitchen floor.

Ldy Meredudd Brangwyn
Kingdom of Anstrorra
Barony of the Steppes


Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 07:56:05 -0700
From: Anne-Marie Rousseau <acrouss at gte.net>
Subject: Re: SC - butter?

hi all from Anne-Marie

re: making butter...

I have found that its important to do it long enough...it will make a big
lump, not just a heavy slurry. If you try and wash it too early it will
disappear down the drain :(. washing it in COLD water helps some.

also, its important to realize (we all know this already, right?) that
the jar method isn’t how medieval people did it, right? We see lots of
medieval illos of people (almost always women) churning butter. You can buy
a medieval looking or modern style churn yourself from Lehmans, though with
the Y2K thang, I understand they're more than a little backordered on
everything.

- --AM


Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 09:56:00 -0400
From: "Alderton, Philippa" <phlip at morganco.net>
Subject: SC - butter churn

Found this, for anybody who's interested.

>Try the Cumberland General Store website.  They sell the masonjar/crank type.
>http://www.cumberlandgeneral.com/find.htm

Phlip

Philippa Farrour
Caer Frig
Southeastern Ohio


Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 22:18:20 -0000
From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?=" <nannar at isholf.is>
Subject: Re: SC - Lefse/hleifr

About the buttered bread reference:

I´ve been trying to find an English translation of the saga of Hakon the Old
(Haakon IV of Norway) - it is in the Flateyjarbók and written in the early
14th century, IIRC, but have been unsuccessful so far. My own translation of
the passage would be something like this:

"At this time the frosts were so great that all their drink froze and the
butter was so hard that the bread served to the king´s son couldn´t be
buttered; he always wanted to be with the king´s court, and everyone liked
him ... the king´s son was standing with the king´s men and was very cold.
He saw that some of the men first took a bite of the bread, then of the
butter. The boy took the butter and wrapped it in the bread ..."

I´m not really sure how to interpret this but two things are clear to me: 1)
the child´s bread was usually buttered 2) the adults were used to eat butter
with their bread - maybe not _on_ it, that is not clear from this passage -
but buttered bread was at least known to them.

Then there is this in Reykdæla saga:

"They ... found a man named ?orgeirr, who was called butter-ring. About him
it is said that he preferred butter and bread above all other food."

Same here - butter is eaten with bread but it is not quite clear if the
bread is actually buttered.

Nanna


Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 12:36:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: Gretchen M Beck <grm+ at andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: SC - butter

Excerpts from internet.listserv.sca-cooks: 14-Sep-99 SC - butter Stefan
li Rous at texas.net (858*)

> > I use unsalted sweet butter, I don't like too much added
> > salt unless I add it!
> > margali

> I was wondering about this in the grocery the other day. Some of the
> butter said "unsalted". Does this mean the rest of the butter is
> salted? In other words, unless it says otherwise the default is
> salted butter?

I believe salted is the default.  In the US, anyhow, you can always
check the ingredient list -- it'll say whether salt has been added.

I find whether I want sweet or  salted butter depends on what I'm using
it for.  For spread, definately sweet.  For sugar cookies and such,
definately sweet.  On the other hand, for pie crusts and oatmeal raisin
cookies, I use salted, because, for crusts, that means I don't have to
add salt to the dry ingrediants, and for oatmeal cookies I get that
wonderful sweet salty combination.

toodles, margaret


Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 22:09:52 -0400
From: "Matilda Prevost-Hart" <matti at globalbiz.net>
Subject: RE: SC - butter

From: Stefan li Rous
>> I use unsalted sweet butter, I don't like too much added
>> salt unless I add it!
>> margali

>I was wondering about this in the grocery the other day. Some of the
>butter said "unsalted". Does this mean the rest of the butter is
>salted? In other words, unless it says otherwise the default is
>salted butter?

The short answer: YES.

(Not to be brusque, however. Salt in butter is a serious preservative, I
merely don't like it personally.)

Mathilde du Neige
mka Matilda Prevost-Hart


Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 12:16:30 -0400
From: "Jim Revells" <sudnserv5 at netway.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Period Butter churn (was Re: memories)

The Colonial Williamsburg collection used to have a small(gallon size)
stoneware crock type churn they sold which was a replica of a late 16th
early 17th century churn.  It looks a lot like what my Grandma Pete used to
use when she made butter (except she used an electric beater).

Olaf


Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 10:54:48 -0500
From: Magdalena <magdlena at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: SC - butter usage

Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> Offhand, I'm not aware of any other clear reference from a period source
> as to what, exactly, was done with butter, other than appearing in
> various non-meat-day menus and dishes, as an ingredient.

breakfast.  How, or with what, I have no idea, but Plat speaks of eating it for
breakfast.  I have included most of Plat's section on butter, specifically how to change the taste and color of butter, plus the bit on clarifying it. (Nothing on honey though.  ;<)


Hugh Plat _Jewel-house of Arte & Nature_ 1594

2. How to make sundry sorts of most dainty butter with the saide oils

[refers to earlier section on distilling essential oils]

 In the month of May, it is very usuall with us to eat some of the smallest, and
youngest sage leaves with butter in a morning, and I think the common use thereof doth sufficiently commende the same to be wholsome, in stead whereof all those which delighte in this heabe may cause a few droppes of the oile of sage to be well wrought, or tempered with the butter when it is new taken out of the cherne, until they find the same strong enough in taste to their owne liking; and this way I accoumpt much more wholsomer then the first, wherin you will finde a far more lively and penetrative tast then can be presently had out of the greene herbe.

 This laste Sommer I did entertaine divers of my friends with this kinde of
butter amongst other country dishes, as also with cinnamon, mace, and clove
butter (which are all made in one selfe same manner) and I knew not whether I did please them more with this new found dish, or offend them by denying the secret unto them, who thought it very strange to find the naturall taste of herbs, and spices coueied into butter without any apparent touch of color.  But I hope I have at this time satisfied their longings.  2re, if by som means or other you may not give a tincture to your creme before you chearne it, either with roseleaves, cowslep leaves, violet or marigold leaves, &c. And thereby chaunge the color of your butter.

 And it may be that if you wash your butter throughly wel with rose water before
you dish it, and work up some fine sugar in it, that the Country people will go
neere to robbe all Cocknies of their breakfasts, unlesse the dairie be well
looked unto.  If you would keepe butter sweete, and fresh a long time to make
sops, broth or cawdle, or to butter any kinde of fishe withall in a better sorte
then I have seene in the best houses where I have come, then dissolve your butter in a clean galsed, or silver vessell & in a pan, or kettle of water with a slow and gentle fire, and powre the same so dissolved, into a bason that hath some faire Water therein, and when it is cold, take away the soote, not suffering any of the curds, or whey to remain in the bottome: and if you regarde not the charge thereof, you may either the first or the second time, dissolve your Butter in Rosewater as before, working them well together, and so Clarifie it, and this butter so clarified, wil bee as sweet in tast, as the Marrow of any beast, by reason of, the great impuritie that is remooved by this manner of handeling:

[rest snipped]

- -Magdalena


Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 10:22:32 -0600
From: Serian <serian at uswest.net>
Subject: SC - butter

Just looking in Hildegard von Bingen's _Physica_, and she
mentions butter as a remedy for congestion and dry skin (the
butter eaten, not spread on skin).  She says that butter
from cows is more healthful than that from sheep or goats.

Serian


Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:15:46 -0400
From: Christine A Seelye-King <mermayde at juno.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Harvest Moon Shoot proposed menu

Other than having quite a few small items at the end that look time
consuming, it looks nice.  On the honey-butter (I know, you said not to
say it ;) since there really isn't anything else sweet in that first
course, you might try an herb butter, which we DO have documentation for.
 (Follows at the end of post.)  I am curious as to how you will keep a
warm lentil salad from getting really mushy in a crock pot.  It sounds
good, and like a whole lot of food for the money!

Christianna


Hugh Plat _Jewel-house of Arte & Nature_ 1594

2. How to make sundry sorts of most dainty butter with the saide oils

[refers to earlier section on distilling essential oils]

 	In the month of May, it is very usuall with us to eat some of the
smallest, and youngest sage leaves with butter in a morning, and I think
the common use thereof doth sufficiently commende the same to be
wholsome, in stead whereof all those which delighte in this heabe may
cause a few droppes of the oile of sage to be well wrought, or tempered
with the butter when it is new taken out of the cherne, until they find
the same strong enough in taste to their owne liking; and this way I
accoumpt much more wholsomer then the first, wherin you will finde a far
more lively and penetrative tast then can be presently had out of the
greene herbe.

 	This laste Sommer I did entertaine divers of my friends with this kinde
of butter amongst other country dishes, as also with cinnamon, mace, and
clove butter (which are all made in one selfe same manner) and I knew not
whether I did please them more with this new found dish, or offend them
by denying the secret unto them, who thought it very strange to find the
naturall taste of herbs, and spices coueied into butter without any
apparent touch of color.  But I hope I have at this time satisfied their
longings.  2re, if by som means or other you may not give a tincture to
your creme before you chearne it, either with roseleaves, cowslep leaves,
violet or marigold leaves, &c. And thereby chaunge the color of your
butter.

 	And it may be that if you wash your butter throughly wel with rose
water before you dish it, and work up some fine sugar in it, that the
Country people will go neere to robbe all Cocknies of their breakfasts,
unlesse the dairie be well looked unto.  If you would keepe butter
sweete, and fresh a long time to make sops, broth or cawdle, or to butter
any kinde of fishe withall in a better sorte then I have seene in the
best houses where I have come, then dissolve your butter in a clean
galsed, or silver vessell & in a pan, or kettle of water with a slow and
gentle fire, and powre the same so dissolved, into a bason that hath some
faire Water therein, and when it is cold, take away the soote, not
suffering any of the curds, or whey to remain in the bottome: and if you
regarde not the charge thereof, you may either the first or the second
time, dissolve your Butter in Rosewater as before, working them well
together, and so Clarifie it, and this butter so clarified, wil bee as
sweet in tast, as the Marrow of any beast, by reason of, the great
impuritie that is remooved by this manner of handeling:

[rest snipped]


Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 17:00:50 -0500
From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
Subject: RE: Sweetened Butter?  (was Re: SC - Harvest Moon Shoot proposed  menu)

The problem with honey butter is there is no direct evidence to demonstrate
it was prepared in period.  In this case, the objective is to alter the
taste of the butter without leaving visible evidence.  Honey tends to
liquify the butter, where a fine sugar powder will cream into butter leaving
little evidence of its presence. 

Honey butter may have been made in period.  It's easy enough to do.  But
without a description or a recipe, the statement honey butter is period is
an unproven assumption.  Many of us believe honey butter is period, but we
can't prove it.

BTW, Plat was an Elizabethan, and while honey may have been more prevalent
than sugar, sugar was not in short supply.  Increased production by the
European nations, primarily Spain and Portugal had cut into the Islamic
sugar trade.  As a result, sugar prices dropped to the place where sugar
became an upper and middle class indulgence rather than a low volume luxury
good.  The Elizabethans loved their sugar.

Bear  

> This last paragraph, mentioning the working of sugar into butter, along
> with the fact that butters served with the essential oils of cinnamon, mace
> and cloves implies to me that folks may have had a taste for sweet butters.
> honey was more readily available than sugar.  So why do we believe that
> honey butter is not period (again, I realize that this may be an old
> argument and a pointer to the flori-thingy will suffice if it's been over
> done>) ?
> 
> I remain, in service to Meridies,
> Lady Celia des L'archier


Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:17:07 -0700
From: Brent Kellmer <BrentK at KINDREDCOM.com>
Subject: RE: Sweetened Butter?  (was Re: SC - Harvest Moon Shoot proposed  menu)

Greetings from Thorgrim of Birka

Bear said:
>The problem with honey butter is there is no direct evidence to 
>demonstrate it was prepared in period.  

Actually, this isn't quite accurate -- while there's no evidence of it being
used as a regular condiment/spread during period, there is clear evidence of
it's use in Anthimus.  He says it's specific to the ill, however.  
_______________________________________
Thorgrim of Birka          mka  Brent Kellmer
Madrone, An Tir              brentk at kindredcom.com    


Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:29:09 -0500
From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
Subject: SC - Butter on the Table

Sunday at Protectorate, Gunthar and I had a discussion about some of the
aspects of the feast, one of them being the fact I had served butter for the
bread (not honey butter, just butter) and whether it was appropriate.  By
accident, I came across the following quote:

"Butter is a wholesome food, first and last
for it soothes the stomach and helps one to
   get rid of poisons
also it helps a man as an aperient and so gets
   rid of ill humors
and with white bread, it has a lingering flavor.

"Milk, cream, curds and also rose junket, 
they close a man's stomach and so are binding;
you must eat hard cheese after them if you sup late
and drink resinated wine to guard against constipation."

The Boke of Nurture (The Babees Book), John Russell, 1460

Given the date, butter might be an appropriate condiment for bread on Tudor
and Elizabethan tables.

To be honest, I have not found a thing about how butter and orange preserves
were eaten, but the went nicely with the bread at the feast.

Bear


Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 20:49:39 -0500
From: "Michael Newton" <melcnewt at netins.net>
Subject: Re: SC - Lamb recipes

From: "Philippa Alderton" <phlip at morganco.net>
> 3. What is May butter? Is that a special name for a butter with more or less
> fat than usual? Or would they have deliberately aged the butter for the
> better part of a year from the last May? (My reasoning on this being that
> Easter usually shows up well before May),

Having checked out Maggie Black's The Medieval Cookbook, and reading it
tonight, I can give you her definition of May butter (not that I would use
it in a recipe):

(pg. 131) For the Colic

"Another poultice recipe! This one is a good deal nastier than it sounds.
May butter was made for children by setting newly made, unsalted butter on
open platters in the sun for almost a fortnight. By that time it was
stinking rancid, colourless and devoid of vitamin A although it did contain
increased vitamin D as a result of the action of the sun's rays."

Beatrix of Tanet


Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 13:02:07 +0100
From: TG <gloning at Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE>
Subject: Re: SC - Lamb recipes: may butter

<< Having checked out Maggie Black's The Medieval Cookbook, and reading
it tonight, I can give you her definition of May butter (not that I
would use it in a recipe):
(pg. 131) For the Colic
"Another poultice recipe! This one is a good deal nastier than it
sounds. May butter was made for children by setting newly made, unsalted
butter on open platters in the sun for almost a fortnight. By that time
it was stinking rancid, colourless and devoid of vitamin A although it
did contain increased vitamin D as a result of the action of the sun's
rays." >>

As far as I can see, the passage you quoted is not a definition of may
butter, but a medical recipe, _using_ may butter. It comes from "A
Leechbook or Collection of Medical Recipes of the Fifteenth Century, ed.
W.R. Dawson, 1934".

According to some German sources, may butter was estimated as very good,
it was used in feast meals and was given as a tax to parsons etc.

More later
Th.


Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 20:59:44 -0500
From: "Siegfried Heydrich" <baronsig at peganet.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Clotted Cream taste test

> It tasted exactly like the homemade butter you can make by
> shaking heavy whipping cream(for what seems like forever), or unsalted
> butter (available in the freezer section of your grocery store).

    I had to crank out a large batch of homemade butter one time - I put my
cream (and buttermilk) in a food safe 5 gallon bucket with a good lid, went
to the paint dealer down the road who handled commercial accounts, and put
it in his paint shaker for about a half hour. Worked great!

    Sieggy


Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 21:13:21 EDT
From: LrdRas at aol.com
Subject: SC - Buttermilk

olwentheodd at hotmail.com writes:
<< If it is dead hot summer and you are churning for too long the milk can sour 
 up some.  Mostly what we used to drink out of the hand churn was not sour, 
 just a little lumpy sometimes.  >>

You are describing 'sweet creamery butter'. A 10 on the ick scale factor with 
10 being the ickiest. Having been raised on a farm, I can assure you that 
neither we nor our neighbors made 'sweet' butter. 

The common practise was to leave the whole milk sitting on the counter 
overnight with a cheesecloth over the top of the container. By morning, the 
natural bacteria would have  done its job. The cream which seperated during 
the night was skimmed off the top and churned into 'real' butter. The liquid 
which seperated from the cream during this process was refrigerated and 
served ice cold for a deliscious tangy treat (usually with mashed potatoes, 
gravy, corn, southern fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits as side dishes. 
:-)).

Ras


From: "Hrolf Douglasson" <Hrolf at btinternet.com>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Homemade butter
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 23:06:16 +0100

> When making butter, is it possible to use a blendr or hand mixer? Also, how
> much butter does a pint of cream yield?
>
> Cerridwyn

Yes it does....I use a hand mixer or my big blender
4 pints of cream with 1 pint of milk added (english pints 20 fluid oz)
gave me over a pound of butter.
When the whey began to flow I added salt then after it completly thickened I
washed it
It was wonderful
patted lots to rid it of the water and it has kept beautifully in the fridge

Vara


From: Devra at aol.com
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 15:47:50 EDT
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #72 - butter

In a message dated 5/20/01 1:04:04 PM Eastern Daylight Time, sca-cooks-
> Wash out the buttermilk, huh?  You know, the
>  instructions didn't say anything about washing out the
>  buttermilk... at least, not to my knowledge.  Care to
>  describe the process?

You scoop out the lumps of butter, which should be clumping together, and put
in a flattish bowl.  Run a light stream of cool water on it, and pat the
butter lumps to and fro with a spoon or spatula, squishing it sorta...  The
washing water will get a little milky as the buttermilk comes out.  Anyone
else have a better description?
Devra the Baker

Devra Langsam
www.poisonpenpress.com
devra at aol.com


From: rcmann4 at earthlink.net
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:37:41 -0400
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Making butter

Here is an excerpt from Markham's _The English Housewife_ on
the subject of making butter.  As the first edition was published in
1615, it is post-period, but I don't think butter-making techniques
changed all that much.

"after your butter is churned, or churned and gathered well together
in your churn, you shall then open your churn, and with both your
hands gather it well together, and take it from the buttermilk, and
put it into a very clean bowl of wood, or pancheon of earth
sweetened for the purpose, and if you intend to spend the butter
sweet and fresh, you shall have your bowl or pancheon filled with
very clean water, and therein with your hand you shall work the
butter, turning and tossing it to and fro till you have by that labour
beaten and washed out all the buttermilk, and brought the butter to
a firm substance of itself, without any other moisture"

Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)


Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 08:03:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Pixel, Queen of Cats" <pixel at hundred-acre-wood.com>
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Making butter

I don't know how period they are, but in Colonial times they used wooden
paddles with grooves running lengthwise along the surface to mash the
butter in the buttermilk/whey removal process. Having used them, I can say
they really do work.

If you're going to be hand-kneading butter, and you have warm hands or the
weather is very warm, you really want to have a separate container of ice
water to dip your hands in occasionally to cool them off. Otherwise what
you get is butter smeared all over your hands. You also want your wash
water to be very cool. Not ice-cold, but cool enough to keep the butter
firm.

Margaret FitzWilliam


To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 14:56:22 -0400
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
From: Elizabeth A Heckert <spynnere at juno.com>

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001 14:41:40 -0500 "Decker, Terry D."
<TerryD at Health.State.OK.US> writes:
>About a year ago, we were discussing whether butter should be served
>at feasts and Gunthar chided me about serving butter at the Protectorate
>feast without documentation.

    From *Women In Old Norse Society* by Jenny Jochens (Cornell U. Press,
Ithaca, 1995.  ISBN 0-8014-3165-4)

     (P.127) "Scarcity of grain meant that in Iceland, unlike in
continental Europe, bread never became a staple.  It was in fact so rare
that people dreamt about it and one man received the nickname
'Butter-Ring' from his favorite food of bread and butter."

    (P.128) "Hard as a board, dried fish was softened by being beaten and
was served with butter.  ... Heavily salted, butter could be kept for
decades; large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners.
 By the time of the Reformation, the bishopric in Holar possesed a
mountain of butter calculated to weigh twenty-five tons."

     Dr. Jochens has based her study mostly on literary sources.


From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?= <nannar at isholf.is>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 23:40:37 -0000

Elizabeth wrote:
>      (P.127) "Scarcity of grain meant that in Iceland, unlike in
> continental Europe, bread never became a staple.

Weeell - that depends on what is meant by "a staple". Bread was probably far
more common in Viking times in Iceland than later on; barley was grown here
until the 1500s or so and some of it was used for breadmaking. There are
enough mentions of bread in the Sagas and other old Icelandic sources to
show it wasn't exactly rare.

>It was in fact so rare
> that people dreamt about it and one man received the nickname
> 'Butter-Ring' from his favorite food of bread and butter."

=DE=F3r=F3lfr smj=F6rhringr of Reykd=E6la saga and V=EDga-Gl=FAms probably got his
nickname because he valued (bread and) butter above all other food but that
doesn't prove anything except that bread was eaten with butter - I mean, I
know of a guy commonly called Gvendur terta (Gvendur cake) because he shows
a marked fondness for cream layer cakes, not because they are excessively
rare here in Iceland. On the contrary, in fact.

>     (P.128) "Hard as a board, dried fish was softened by being beaten and
> was served with butter.

We still do that, quite often. I still spread my dried fish liberally with
butter when I want to treat myself. But dried fish only gradually became a
substitute for bread in the Icelandic diet. Besides, _everything_ used to be
served with butter here.

 ... Heavily salted, butter could be kept for
> decades; large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners.

Heavily salted??? Oh no no. One of the strongest characteristics of pre-19th
century Icelandic cuisine is the almost complete lack of salt. Butter was
"soured" (I'm not sure what the proper English term is here and old sources
say that butter treated in this way could easily keep unspoiled (and it WAS
considered unspoiled, although I doubt modern people would think so) for at
least 20 years, whereas salted butter was said to keep only two years. Most
Icelanders actually preferred this to salted butter, but others usually
found it quite disgusting.

>  By the time of the Reformation, the bishopric in Holar possesed a
> mountain of butter calculated to weigh twenty-five tons."

 Sounds about right. Keep in mind that this wasn't really a case of
landowners hoarding all the butter they could possibly get because it was so
sought after; rather that most farmers paid their rents and taxes in butter,
it being more or less the only thing they had to pay with, so the landowners
were stuck with the butter mountains, wether they really wanted them or not.
But after all, the butter was virtually non-perishable.

Nanna


From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
To: "'sca-cooks at ansteorra.org'" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 14:41:40 -0500
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Butter

About a year ago, we were discussing whether butter should be served at
feasts and Gunthar chided me about serving butter at the Protectorate feast
without documentation.  I've been casually looking for documentation since.

The little piece which follows is identified as being from a French Latin
poem entitled Modus cenandi (The Way of Dining) from approximately 1180.
Martha Carlin identifies it as being from Daniel of Beccles' Urbanus magnus
and that the particular English translation is from Furnival's The Babee's
Book (1868).

I find it interesting that the author includes butter, cheese, milk and eggs
as food for fasts.  The manners for eating butter and cheese are also
fascinating.

The full text with other references to butter can be found at:
http://www.saradouglass.com/primdocs/waydine.html

Bear


Let potage be given when fasts are celebrated.
Herring, mullet, salmon, conger; afterwards let lighter
Dishes be put on table, =D1 roaches, & perches, & pikes.
Let not a bit of fish without the skin be put on the table.
Last, let soft dishes, & fried puddings follow.
If fishes are wanting, let butter, milk, cheese, eggs,
Be given to the guests who are willing to eat them.
Let old cheese be cut thin,
And let fresh cheese be cut thick for those that eat it.
Do not press the cheese & the butter on to your bread with the thumb.
In (the case of) which eating, if the things are soft, let them be smeared
With a knife, or with a crust of bread; let them be held with a cloth
So that when the crust is taken away, they may be placed in the hollow
bread;
Let him eat them [cheese etc.] with bread when he eats them, and not swallow
them (by themselves)
Unless he sits master of his own feast in the house.


Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2001 23:11:00 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Ghee

Magdalena wrote:
> Has anybody here made their own ghee?  I just finished a pound of
> butter, and have some questions about what I did.  It took some time for
> all the moisture to finish boiling out, but once it stopped crackling
> the oil turned golden brown in no time.  I had a hard time determining
> if it was ready to take off the burner yet.  Should the ghee still have
> been yellow when I poured it off, or was it ok to let it get somewhat
> brown?  Did I just ruin a good, expensive pound of organic butter?

I dunno. I think, from the times I made ghee years ago, what you're
aiming at is a certain browning of the milk solids, but not necessarily
any serious browning of the clarified butter portion. At most, it should
go from being the bright yellow of clarified butter to a sort of golden,
light amber shade.

Adamantius


Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2001 13:17:50 -0700
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
From: James Prescott <prescotj at telusplanet.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Ghee

At 23:10 -0400 2001-09-01, Tara wrote:
> Has anybody here made their own ghee?  I just finished a pound of
> butter, and have some questions about what I did.  It took some time for
> all the moisture to finish boiling out, but once it stopped crackling
> the oil turned golden brown in no time.  I had a hard time determining
> if it was ready to take off the burner yet.  Should the ghee still have
> been yellow when I poured it off, or was it ok to let it get somewhat
> brown?  Did I just ruin a good, expensive pound of organic butter?

Ghee needs a slow simmer (about an hour) to drive the water off,
plus thorough skimming / pouring / straining to remove _all_ solids.

Pure ghee (no solids) withstands heat quite well without burning.

If the oil is overheated it affects the flavour; but if it isn't
too strong of a 'burnt' flavour (taste it!), and if you're frugal,
and if you only use it for dishes where the bit of extra flavour
doesn't matter (e.g. pancakes or any high-heat Indian food), there
may be no need to throw it out.

Thorvald


From: "Robin Carroll-Mann" <rcmann4 at earthlink.net>
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 20:10:03 -0500
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] honey butter

On 4 Mar 2002, at 16:41, Laura C. Minnick wrote:
> This discussion may well be merely academic, of course. I think we've
> talked about it before, and noticed the incredible *lack* of any
> evidence that there was butter on the tables in period...

I've recently come across one reference. I've been going through books of
courtesy, in preparation for a schola class on table manners. In the "Urbanus
magnus" (c. 1180), the following lines discuss dinners on fast days:

"If fishes are wanting, let butter, milk, cheese, eggs,
Be given to the guests who are willing to eat them.
Let old cheese be cut thin,
And let fresh cheese be cut thick for those that eat it.
Do not press the cheese & the butter on to your bread with the thumb.
In (the case of) which eating, if the things are soft, let them be smeared
With a knife, or with a crust of bread; let them be held with a cloth
So that when the crust is taken away, they may be placed in the hollow bread;
Let him eat them [cheese etc.] with bread when he eats them, and not swallow
them (by themselves)
Unless he sits master of his own feast in the house."

(This is an English translation of the Latin original, taken from "The Babees
Book", ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall.)

I would gather from the above that butter was sometimes served at meals and
was spread on bread.

Brighid ni Chiarain *** mka Robin Carroll-Mann
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom
rcmann4 at earthlink.net


Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 16:00:38 -0800 (PST)
From: Terri Spencer <taracook at yahoo.com>
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Butter (was Honey Butter? No! No!)

Brighid cited a latin poem "The Way of Dining" from 1180 instructing
that butter and soft cheese be eaten spread on bread, thus documenting
bread and butter at feast.  Her post prompted me to re-read my copy of
the translation in The Babees Book, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall.
Therein, in John Russell's Boke of Nurture (1460-70), I had previously
marked:

Good sone, alle maner frute, that longethe for seson of the yere,
Fygges, reysons, almandes, dates, buttur, chese, nottus, apples, & pere,
Compostes & confites, chare de quynces, white & grene gyngere;
and ffor aftur questyons, or thy lord sytte, of hym thow know & enquere.
Serve fastynge, plonnys, damsons, cheries, and grapis to plese;
aftur mete, peeres, nottys, strawberies, wyneberies, and hardchese,
also blawnderelles, pepyns, careawey in fomfyte, Compostes ar like to pese.
aftur sopper, rosted apples, peres, blaunche powder, your stomak for to ese.
Bewar at eve of crayme of cowe & also of the goote, thaugh it be late,
of Strawberies & hurtilberyes with the cold Ioncate
For these may marre many a man changynge his astate,
but iff he have aftur, hard chese, wafurs, with wyne ypocrate.
hard chese hathe his condicioun in his operacioun:
Furst he wille a stomak kepe in the botom open,
the helthe of euery creature ys in his conicioun;
yf he diete yhm thus dayly, he is a good conclusioun.
buttir is an holsom mete / furst and eke last,
For he wille a stomak kepe / & helps poyson a-wey to cast,
also he norishethe a man to be laske / and evy humerous to wast
and with white bred / he wille kepe thy mouthe in tast.

Wynkyn de Worde's Boke of Kervynge, 1513 repeats this pretty closely
(the editor suggests they are copies of a common earlier source, the
text is online at http://milkmama.tripod.com/kervynge2.html). Some
small differences:

Also loke ye have in all seasons butter, chese, apples...
Serve fastynge butter, plommes, damesons...
butter is holsome fyrst & last, for it wyll do awaye all poysons...

"Serve fastynge" is interpreted as before dinner, so it might be the
first course at table, or it could be served elsewhere.  The Way of
Dining starts the meal with potage, and ends thus:

Let dishes of things fried be the last course of the dinner,
Let a napkin contain wafers, spices, fruits, gaugres, light cakes,
when they are served to the lords.
Empty plates being brought, he allowably gives delicious food to his
patrons eating at the table.

This sounds like an "issue de table", or perhaps a separate serving to
bind and close the stomach. It matches many menus and feast
descriptions from the classic Greek "second table" to the late period
English Banquet.  I can't think of any that start with fruits, nuts,
butter & cheeses (though they've been served first at many an SCA
feast). Can anyone?

"Butter is holsome fyrst & last" sounds promising, but the editor says
it does not refer to it's place in the meal.  He quotes Thomas Muffett
(Health's Improvement, 1655) on butter: "best for children...and for
old men; but very unwholsom betwixt those two ages, because...it is
forthwith converted into choler".  None of my humoral sources agree.
I've checked Platina, Hildegard & Tacuinum Sanitatis; they wrote that
butter is warm, moist, nourishing and fattening, healthy in moderation.
 The Way of Dining says butter dissipates humors.  The worst I can find
is that it can render the stomach apathetic, and too much breeds phlegm
- not choler.  Do any period writings agree with Muffet?  If not, we're
back to butter first and last at the meal, spread politely on bread,
some small support for SCA tradition - without the honey.

Stefan wrote:
> earlier than the 14th Century I would go with something else. In
> southern Europe, you might consider olive oil instead of butter. In
> general butter was a northern Europe item while olive oil was more
> common in the south.

I've been thinking of this for a feast I'm planning, and Platina
confirms the use of olive oil instead of butter in the south.  But not
specifically on bread.  Are there any southern sources that mention it?
 Are there ever herbs, salt, perhaps garlic in the oil?  Hot bread with
herbed oil dip...yum!

Tara


Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 22:43:34 -0500
From: johnna holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: Moffet/Muffet Butter

In her note which I have snipped Tara/Terri Spencer wrote:
> "Butter is holsome fyrst & last" sounds promising, but the editor says
> it does not refer to it's place in the meal.  He quotes Thomas Muffett
> (Health's Improvement, 1655) on butter: "best for children...and for
> old men; but very unwholsom betwixt those two ages, because...it is
> forthwith converted into choler".  None of my humoral sources agree.
> snipped----Do any period writings agree with Muffet?  If not, we're
> back to butter first and last at the meal, spread politely on bread,
> some small support for SCA tradition - without the honey.

Thomas Muffet or Moffet's discourse was written prior to his death
in perhaps 1594 or perhaps as late as 1597.
His work remained unpublished until 1655 when Christopher
Bennett finished, enlarged and published it. It was published
again in 1746. Both Moffet and Bennett were physicians. Perhaps
the reason why Moffet's advice does not correlate with that given
in the earlier dietaries is that Moffet evaluated what the earlier
works said and then revised the traditional advice along the lines
of his own experience and observations. There was
interesting article on Moffet and this book that was published under
the title: "How Good Were Little Miss Muffet's Curds and Whey?" by
Victor Houliston. It appears in the Oxford Symposium papers from
1986 entitled "The Cooking Medium." Houliston not only examines
how Moffet approached his work, but also delves into the background
of whether or not Moffet's daughter ate her curds and whey while
seated on the infamous "tuffet"...

Johnnae llyn Lewis  Johnna Holloway


From: "Decker, Terry D." <TerryD at Health.State.OK.US>
To: "'sca-cooks at ansteorra.org'" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: RE [Sca-cooks] Butter
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 09:25:58 -0600

Pliny comments on the use of butter by the Germanic tribes.  Five to six
hundred years later, Anthimus (IIRC) comments on butter as a medicine.  The
Irish used butter mixed with meal as a spread for bread.

The "Latin poem" quoted is an excerpt (lines 2524-2832) from Daniel of
Beccles' "Urbanus Magnus," a medical treatise (IIRC).

Butter appears in later works as noted.

The evidence supports the idea that northern Europe used butter before the
Middle Ages and continued using it through the Middle Ages and beyond.  The
evidence supports its use on bread.  No direct evidence seems to cover
butter's general use during meals (the few references are culture specific).
However, butter is a condiment which does not require preparation after
manufacture.  The only reason we know other condiments were used is largely
due to the recipes for their preparation in the kitchen.  Given that butter
is documented in generally available texts across a large temporal and
spatial area, it is probable that butter was often eaten at meat day meals
including feasts.

In other words, butter is a reasonable compromise as a table condiment in a
northern European feast, even though we can not absolutely prove it was
eaten.  I would avoid it for southern European and Arabic feasts.

BTW, butter was a multi-purpose fat.  One Roman writer commented upon the
odor of the barbarians, because they used butter to grease their hair.

Bear


From: jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:47:42 -0500 (EST)
To: "'sca-cooks at ansteorra.org'" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: RE [Sca-cooks] Butter

> In other words, butter is a reasonable compromise as a table condiment in a
> northern European feast, even though we can not absolutely prove it was
> eaten.

None of the Janet Hinson translations of Le Menagier de Paris mention
butter on the table, but there's this tantalizing fragment:

"Arrangements for the wedding done by Master Helye in May, on a Tuesday;
dinner only for twenty bowls.
Platter: butter, none because it is a meat day. Item, cherries, none,
because none could be found; and so no platter.
Soups..."

-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa


Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:42:29 -0500
From: "Ruth Tannahill" <rtanhil at fast.net>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: buttered bread
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

From Ann Hagen, "A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing and
Consumption," Norfolk, England: Anglo-Saxon Books 1992, pp. 18-19. "....The
author of 'Leechdoms' also considered bread a strengthing food....The
standard meal was a loaf and something to eat with it. Possibly bread was
already being eaten with butter as one of the 'accompaniments': 'Then give
barley bread and pure new butter to the invalid to eat' (tham mannum sceal
sellan aegra to suppane, beren bread, slaen niwe buteran)."

Berelinde


Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 12:42:55 -0700 (PDT)
From: Carole Smith <renaissancespirit2 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Cooking fats in period England
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

There are other groups that use clarified butter today, and probably in  
period as well.  The Arabic word is samneh (pronounced Sam nah with  
slight emphasis on the first syllable).  And of course clarified butter  
is used in French cooking as well.

Cordelia

aeduin <aeduin at adelphia.net> wrote:
Close, but no OOP cigar. Ghee is butter that has been clarified and
simmered cooking the fat and evaporating all the water giving it a  
slightly nutty taste.

Æduin


Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 22:21:09 -0400
From: Daniel Myers <eduard at medievalcookery.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Cooking fats in period England
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

On Jul 17, 2005, at 3:42 PM, Carole Smith wrote:
> There are other groups that use clarified butter today, and
> probably in period as well.  The Arabic word is samneh (pronounced
> Sam nah with slight emphasis on the first syllable).  And of course
> clarified butter is used in French cooking as well.

Interestingly enough, there is an ingredient with a similar name and
purpose ("saim") being used in period France.  Check lines 15 and 35
below.

  From "Enseignements qui enseingnent a apareillier toutes manieres de
viandes" (ca. 1300)
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/%7Egloning/1300ens.htm
http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/lessons.shtm (my translation)

|13| Char de porc: la loingne en rost, en yver e en estei, as aus
vers. E qui en
|14| veut en chivei si la depieche par morseaus; (c)e puis cuisiez
oingnons en
|15| saim, e broez de poivre e d'autres espices e pain ars, e
desfaites en un
|16| mortier; puis destrempez de l'eve ou le porc sera cuit; puis metez
|17| boillir e metez sus les morseaus qui avront estei arochié e du
sel, e tout
|18| cen metez en escueles e du chivé de sus.

(Pork: roasted loin, in winter and in summer, with green garlic. And
which if wanted in gravy then cut it into pieces; And then cook
onions in grease, and ground pepper and other spices and toasted
bread, and grind in a mortar; Then temper with the water that the
pork cooked in; Then put it to boil and put over the pieces which
have been pulled and of salt, and all this put in a bowl with the
gravy thereon.)

[...]

|32| por char de veel -- Char de veel en rost, la loingne parboullie
en eve, e puis lardee e rostie
|33| e mengie as aus vers ou au poivre. E se vous en volez a la
charpie, parboulliez
|34| la en eve e puis si la depechiez par morseaus en une pelle, et puis
|35| frissiez les morseaus en une paiele en saim ou (la) lart, e puis
metez des
|36| oués batuz dessus, e puis poudrés [pondrez_(o')_Ms.] de sus de
poivre, si sera charpie. E se
|37| aucuns en veut en pasté, parboulliez la en eve e puis lardez,
detrenchiez
|38| par morseaus e les metez en pasté.

(For veal -- Roasted veal, the loin parboiled in water, and then lard
and eat with green garlic or pepper. And if you would like it
minced, parboil it in water and then cut into pieces in a pan, and
then fry the pieces in a pan in grease or bacon fat, and then put
beaten eggs therein, and then sprinkle with pepper, then that is
minced. And if otherwise wanted in a pie, parboil it in water and
then lard it, slice into pieces and put it in a pie.)


In both cases I translated this as "grease".

Scully has "sain" and "saing" in the glossary of _Viandier_ and
defines it as, "drippings from a roast, grease (esp. of pork)."

Greg Lindahl's site seems to be down, so I can't check Cottgrave's
dictionary. (I hope it's just temporary)

- Doc
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
   Edouard Halidai  (Daniel Myers)


Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:42:50 -0500
From: "marilyn traber 011221" <phlip at 99main.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] freezing butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

> So, do butter and margarine freeze okay? For how long?
>
> Stefan

Butter freezes just fine. R&M and I tend to go through lots of it, and every
time Rob goes to BJs, he gets an Omigawd package of butter-- I think it's 6
pounds. We put what we aren't using in the freezer, have an open pound in the
fridge, and take sticks out to keep a bit warmer in a butter dish on the
counter. All butter does is get a bit harder- it thaws pretty quickly.

Phlip


Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:54:48 -0600
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] freezing butter
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

> So, do butter and margarine freeze okay? For how long?
>
> Stefan

Butter freezes well and I've used some as old as two years from a deep
freeze.  I prefer deep freeze to self defrosting freezers for storing such
things.

I haven't tried it with margarine, but I suspect it may not be as
satisfactory because of the blending of different types of fat.

Bear


Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:32:14 +0100
From: Volker Bach <carlton_bach at yahoo.de>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] freezing butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

Am Donnerstag, 22. Dezember 2005 06:21 schrieb Mark Hendershott:
> Somewhat related question.  I acquired a reprint cookbook originally
> published in 1939.  Some of the recipes for baked goods say to wash
> and dry the butter.  Is this significant?  Maybe 1939 butter (Swedish
> butter as it happens) needed cleaning?

I know of 'washing' butter in earlier times, when it basically means agitating
the butter in/under cold water. The point was to get the salt out that was
added to preserve it. I don't know if that was still an issue in Sweden in
'39, but salted butter is still popular in Scandinavia and if they are sweet
baked goods, that makes sense.

Giano


Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:22:45 -0500
From: Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise <jenne at fiedlerfamily.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] freezing butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

> So, do butter and margarine freeze okay? For how long?

Pretty much indefinitely. You buy the butter when it is on sale, and put
it in the freezer for later. That's a trick my mom taught me.
-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 


Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:11:37 -0500
From: Tara Sersen Boroson <tara at kolaviv.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks freezing butter
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

I've left both store bought and homemade, raw butter out on the counter
to keep it soft.  In cool-ish temperatures, it will keep for a long
time.  In summer temperatures with no a/c, store bought will go rancid
in about a week.  Raw butter will become progressively more sour until
it's... distasteful due to the natural bacterial cultures, but if it's
well washed, it shouldn't go rancid, or at least it won't go rancid
before it's too sour to eat anyway ;)  (There's a clear difference
between rancid and sour milk or butter.  Sour is, well, tart and maybe a
little gamey.  Rancid is FOUL.)

I've frozen both store bought and homemade raw butter with no apparant
loss of quality.  In fact, I really ought to freeze some of my last
batch of homemade butter.  Since I've gone gluten free I'm not doing
much baking this Christmas, so I'm not going through it very quickly...

-Magdalena vander Brugghe


Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:00:36 -0800
From: "Nick Sasso" <grizly at mindspring.com>
Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] freezing butter
To: "'Cooks within the SCA'" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

> -----Original Message-----
>> So, do butter and margarine freeze okay? For how long?
>
> i have always frozen them, esp butter (don't use margerine
> anymore, evil doncha know).  i stock up on those rare
> occasions smith's or abbertson's sells it for 2 bucks a
> pound.  hoard it away for christmas baking.  some was
> frozen for months at a time and i have not noticed any
> problems.
>
> cailte
> cookie monster

You should know that thawing should be a gradual process rather than
something speeded up.  The emulsion of water and butterfat crystallizes
rather solidly in the freezer, and needs to relax in order to be useful in
cooking.  If just going on toast, then nuke it up and brush it on.  You can
see some more detailed explanation of fat crystals in "Cookwise" the book by
O'Corriher, a food scientist.  It really is intriguing how the structure of
the fats effects the baked goods.

Margarine has a higher water content usually, and will behave slightly
differently.  Still, at 80%+ fat, freezing and thawing should not do much to
your sticks or tubs.  I'm thawing out some rendered bacon fat this afternoon
for some frying . . . been there about 4 months, and shouldn't be the worse
for the wear.  Too much longer and I'd get worried, being an animal fat.

niccolo difrancesco


Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:44:37 -0500
From: ranvaig at columbus.rr.com
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re:keeping butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

You can keep salted butter on the counter, but unsalted will spoil
much sooner.  I had a stick of unsalted butter go moldy in the fridge
once too.  I keep mine in the fridge because I like cold butter on
warm bread.  And the extras keep in the freezer.

Ranvaig


Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 08:22:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Tom Vincent <tom.vincent at yahoo.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Ghee for SCA cooking
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I thought I'd  
suggest that if folks want to use clarified butter to get a higher  
heat level without the smoke of melted butter, your local South Asian  
(aka Indian) grocer has ghee for about $10 a quart, which is a great  
price.

   They also have a vegetarian ghee, but I haven't had any experience  
with it.

Clarified butter (ghee) is butter without the solids, so you get the  
rich butter flavor.

   More authentic period-wise for Northern European cooking than  
olive oil.

   Duriel van Hansard
   Caer Adamant


Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:01:59 -0500
From: "King's Taste Productions" <kingstaste at comcast.net>
Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] Ghee for SCA cooking
To: <TomRVincent at yahoo.com>, "'Cooks within the SCA'"
	<sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

There is a difference between ghee and clarified butter.  Clarified
butter has been melted, resulting in three distinct layers.  The top
layer is solidified whey proteins.  The bottom layer is water and milk
solids.  The middle layer is pure butterfat, the oil portion.  To
clarify the oil, you skim the top later off and remove the oil from the
bottom layer with a ladle or careful pouring.  The resulting oil is
higher in smoke point (the temperature it will burn at) and will keep
longer than whole butter.

With ghee, the whole butter is melted and then slow-cooked.  The water
is released as steam and the milk solids form brown solids and sink to
the bottom, then are strained out. There is a slight difference in taste
(I think) between the two, but you're talking really fine-line heraldry
here (sorry, a reference from my days married to a Kingdom Herald) - for
all intents and purposes it is the same end product.
$10 a quart is indeed a great price.

Christianna

=====
I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I thought I'd
suggest that if folks want to use clarified butter to get a higher heat
level without the smoke of melted butter, your local South Asian (aka
Indian) grocer has ghee for about $10 a quart, which is a great price.

   They also have a vegetarian ghee, but I haven't had any experience
with it.

Clarified butter (ghee) is butter without the solids, so you get the
rich butter flavor.

   More authentic period-wise for Northern European cooking than olive
oil.

   Duriel van Hansard
   Caer Adamant
=====


Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:09:10 +1200
From: Adele de Maisieres <ladyadele at paradise.net.nz>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Ghee for SCA cooking
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

King's Taste Productions wrote:
> There is a slight difference in taste
> (I think) between the two, but you're talking really fine-line heraldry
> here (sorry, a reference from my days married to a Kingdom Herald) - for
> all intents and purposes it is the same end product.
> $10 a quart is indeed a great price.

Yes, you are correct, there is a difference in the production method and
the taste is slightly different (ghee has a slightly nutty, "cooked"
taste).  The difference is probably slight enough, though, that one can
be substituted for the other in many circumstances.
-- 
Adele de Maisieres


Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:17:44 -0500
From: "Daniel  Phelps" <phelpsd at gate.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter- salted vs unsalted
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Was written:
<<< Not even sure if butter was a commonly used product during all the time we
cover.

Snip

  There are some accounts of preserving butter for the winter or shipping
from area to area, .... >>>

While it approaches the question of trade in butter in a rather oblique
fashion there is, if I recall correctly, at least one rather scatological
story in the following book that touches on the subject in that it involves
a sharper passing off for sale one or more casks of something other than
butter, covered with a layer of butter, as butter.  It might have been lard
however.  I will look for my copy of this book but I think that it is
packed.

A Hundred Merry Tales and other Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Century.  Edited by P.M. Zall.  University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln
Nebraska 1963

Daniel


Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:41:35 -0500
From: "Elise Fleming" <alysk at ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter- salted vs unsalted
To: "sca-cooks at ansteorra.org" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

At the Leeds Food History Symposium last year ("Moulded Foods") the speaker
on butter said that butter that was shipped any distance was salted.
(Those were the ones that were moulded.)  Butter made and used locally was
generally unsalted.

Alys Katharine


Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:29:26 -0800
From: Lilinah <lilinah at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter- salted vs unsalted
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

Alexa <mysticgypsy1008 at yahoo.com>
>   I was wondering, in many recipes butter is  called for,  often not
> specified salted or not.  What is the prefered or what would have
> been more used in our sca time frames?
>
>   I know I would rather put salted butter on my bread but wouldn't
> use it when making frosting.

  From what i have read, salted butter would be the thing most of the
time. Without refrigeration, salting helps butter keep longer. I know
I've read recipes that call for washing the salt out of it before
using for particular purposes. A few recipes specify fresh or sweet
butter, but if recipes don't so specify, I assume salted.

I also have read a number of recipes that indicate that for serious
frying, the butter has previously been clarified. Since clarified
butter keeps longer without those milky particles, it's possible that
a fair amount of butter was clarified before storage. However, I'm
not a dairy specialist, so I don't know for certain.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita


Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:56:30 -0500
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius"
	<adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter- salted vs unsalted
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Nov 10, 2006, at 5:05 PM, Sandragood at aol.com wrote:
> I personally use salted butter, but I'm a saltaholic.  When using in
> recipes, I omit any other salt listed separately and then judge by
> taste.

My experience has been that salted butter browns too quickly in a
saute pan; if you have a hot pan and don't want that effect, you're
probably better off with unsalted.

Adamantius


Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:32:12 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Bread and butter issues
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I came across some mentions of butter eating among continental Europeans
when I was searching for mentions of butter and bread in the fall.

  From An itinerary vvritten by Fynes Moryson Gent. 1617

CHAP. IIII. Of the vnited Prouinces in Netherland, and of Denmarke and
Poland, touching the said subiects of the precedent third Chapter.

Page 97

Touching this peoples diet, Butter is the first and last dish at the
Table, whereof they make all sawces, especially for fish, and thereupon
by strangers they are merrily   called Butter-mouths. They are much
delighted with white meats, and the Bawers drinke milke in stead of
beere, and as well Men as Weomen, passing in boates from City to City
for trade, carry with them cheese, and boxes of Butter for their foode,
whereupon in like sort strangers call them Butter boxes, and nothing is
more ordinary then for Citizens of good accompt and wealth to sit at
their dores, (euen dwelling in the market place) holding in their hands,
and eating a great lumpe of bread and Butter with a lunchen of cheese.
They vse to seeth little peeces of flesh in Pipkins, with rootes and
gobbets of fat mingled therewith, without any cutiosity; and this they
often seeth againe, setting it each meale of the weeke on the Table,
newly heated, and with some addition of flesh rootes or fat morsels, as
they thinke needfull, and this dish is vulgar|ly called Hutspot. They
feed much vpon rootes, which the boyes of rich men deuoure raw with a
morsell of bread, as they runne playing in the streetes. They vse most
commonly fresh meates, and seldome set any salt meates on the board,
except it beat Feasts to prouoke drinking. They vse no spits to roast
meat, but bake them in an earthen pipkin as in an ouen, and so likewise
seeth them: And these meates being cold, they often heat and serue to
the Table, so as I haue come into an Inne, and being in the Kitchen,
could see nothing ready for supper, yet presently called to supper, haue
seene a long Table furnished with these often heated meats, which
smoaked on the outside, yet were cold on the inside. This people is
prouerbially said to excell in baked meates, especially in baking of
Venison; yet to my knowledge they haue no red Deare in these Prouinces,

So some two centuries after your mention they are still known for butter
eating.

Johnnae

Volker Bach wrote:
>  The sentence that struck me was:
>
> Du enscalt nicht de botteren planeren mit dem dumen
> uppe din brot alse ein Vrese
>
> You shall not spread the butter over your bread with
> your thumb like a Frisian.
>
> Butter apparently was provided as a kind of condiment
> at table (the text speaks of adding it to spoon
> dishes, and coordinating this with your fellow diner),
> and I wish I knew whether the author here
> disapproves of the combination with bread, the
> spreading, or the use of the thumb.
>
> Nifty. I like the last days of being sick - time for
> research, not too much fever.


Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:04:41 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Bread and butter issues
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Here's the text-- *PAGE 97*

For when Husbands either breake in life time, or be found banckerouts at
death, the Wiues are preferred to all debters in the recouery of their
dowry. Notwithstanding Bruges at this day by the third generall taxe of
Flaunders yet in vse, payes something more then Ghant for publike vses.
These be the words of Iacobus Marchantius.

The foresaid trade of the vnited Prouinces, hath at home much commodity
and increase by the Riuers, (as the Rheine bringing downe the
commodities of Germany), and by the standing or little mouing waters,
which are most frequent, and by channels or ditches wrought by hand, and
bearing at least little boates for passage to each City and Village: but
these waters for the most part ending in standing pooles, by reason they
fall into a low ground neere the Sea, the Ayre is vnholsome, the waters
are nei|ther of good smell nor taste, neither doe they driue Mils, as
running waters doe elsewhere, of which kind they haue few or none. My
selfe in a darke rainy day passing one of these said narrow channels,
numbered an hundred little boates at least, which passed by vs, (and are
hired at a low rate) whereby the great trade and singular indu|stry of
the Inhabitants may be coniectured. Adde that besides, the German Sea,
lying vpon diuers of these Prouinces, they haue many Armes of the Sea,
that runne farre within Land. All the Riuers fall from Germany, which in
this lower soyle often ouerflowing, haue changed their old beds, and
falling into ditches made by hand, doe no more runne with their wonted
force, but (as I haue said in the description of Holland) doe end (as it
were) in lakes. By reason of the foresaid industry of the people
inhabiting the vnited Prouinces, the number of their ships, and the
commodity of their Seas and waters, howsoeuer they want of their owne
many things for necessity and de|light, yet there is no where greater
abundance of all things, neither could any Nation indowed with the
greatest riches by nature, haue so long borne as they haue done a ciuell
warre, and intollerable exactions and tributes, much lesse could they by
this mischiefe haue growne rich, as this people hath done. One thing not
vsed in any other Countrey, is here most common, that while the Husbands
snort idly at home, the Weomen especially of Holland, for trafficke
sayle to Hamburg, and manage most part of the businesse at home, and in
neighbour Cities. In the shops they sell all, they take all accompts,
and it is no teproch to the men to be neuer inquited after, about these
affaires, who taking money of their wiues for daily expences, gladly
passe their time in idlenesse.

Touching this peoples diet, Butter is the first and last dish at the
Table, whereof they make all sawces, especially for fish, and thereupon
by strangers they are merrily  called Butter-mouths. They are much
delighted with white meats, and the Bawers drinke milke in stead of
beere, and as well Men as Weomen, passing in boates from City to City
for trade, carry with them cheese, and boxes of butter for their foode,
whereupon in like sort strangers call them Butter boxes, and nothing is
more ordinary then for Citizens of good accompt and wealth to sit at
their dores, (euen dwelling in the market place) holding in their hands,
and eating a great lumpe of bread and butter with a lunchen of cheese.
They vse to seeth little peeces of flesh in Pipkins, with rootes and
gobbets of fat mingled therewith, without any cutiosity; and this they
often seeth againe, setting it each meale of the weeke on the Table,
newly heated, and with some addition of flesh rootes or fat morsels, as
they thinke needfull, and this dish is vulgar|ly called Hutspot. They
feed much vpon rootes, which the boyes of rich men de|uoure raw with a
morsell of bread, as they runne playing in the streetes. They vse most
commonly fresh meates, and seldome set any salt meates on the board,
except it beat Feasts to prouoke drinking. They vse no spits to roast
meat, but bake them in an earthen pipkin as in an ouen, and so likewise
seeth them: And these meates being cold, they often heat and serue to
the Table, so as I haue come into an Inne, and being in the Kitchen,
could see nothing ready for supper, yet presently called to supper, haue
seene a long Table furnished with these often heated meats, which
smoaked on the outside, yet were cold on the inside. This people is
prouerbially said to excell in baked meates, especially in baking of
Venison; yet to my knowledge they haue no red Deare in these Prouinces,
neither haue they any inclosed Parkes for fallow Deare, nor *PAGE 98*

any Connygrees. Onely Count Mauritz hath of late had out of England some
Buckes and Does of fallow Deare, which runne in the groue at the Hage,
and there be some Connies neere Leyden vpon the sandy banke of the Sea,
which are not sufficient to serue the Inhabitants of those parts, but
are accounted good and pleasant to eat. Neither in forraigne parts doe
they much desire to feed on Connies, either because they are rare, or
because the flesh is not sauoury. They vse to eate early in the
mor|ning, euen before day, and the cloth is laid foure times in the day
for very seruants, but two of these times they set before them nothing
but cheese and butter. They seeth all their meate in water falling of
raine, and kept in Cesternes. They eate Mushromes and the binder parts
of frogges for great dainties, which frogges young men vse to catch and
present them to their Mistresses for dainties. I haue seene a hundreth
of Oysters in diuers Cities sold sometimes for eight or twelue, yea for
twenty or thirty stiuers. They dresse fresh water fish with butter more
then enough, and salted fishes sauourly with butter & mustard: where
they eate not at an Ordinary, but vpon reckoning (as they doe in
Villages and poorer Innes), there they weigh the cheese when it is set
on Table, and taken away, being paid by the waight; and I haue knowne
some waggish Souldiers, who put a leaden bullet into the Cheese, making
it thereby weigh little lesse then at first sitting downe, and so
deceiuing their Hosts: But in the chiefe Innes, a man shall eate at an
Ordinary, and there Gentlemen and others of inferiour condition sit at
the same Table, and at the same rate.

When he speaks of the united provinces, it's with regard to "The vnited
Prouinces of Netherland"

Johnnae

ranvaig at columbus.rr.com wrote:
> Does the quote refer to Netherlands, Denmark, and Poland?  or just  
> Netherlands?
>
> Ranvaig


Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:39:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: Huette von Ahrens <ahrenshav at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Bread and butter issues
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I think that if the author objected to butter being spread on bread, he would have stated the phrase differently.  It sounds to me that he is objecting to butter being spread with the thumb, which he seems to think that only Frisians do and therefore don't copy them.

Huette

--- Volker Bach <carlton_bach at yahoo.de> wrote:

> Something I just came across doing research on
> manners:
>
> A Middle Low German guide to table manners dated to
> the fourteenth century, originally published by A.
> L?bben in Germania 21, 1876m pp. 424-430. I'm working
> on getting my hands on the original data, right now
> I'm going from a reprinting in Endermann, H.: So du zu
> tische wollest gan, Union Verlag Berlin, 1991.


Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:53:59 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Manchet
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Michael Gunter wrote:
>  Were I to make it again I'd add a little more
> salt, but as I explained at the demo there aren't any references in period
> manuals about spreading butter or anything on bread. I have seen
> references about bread being sprinkled with a little salt. This bread
> bore that out. A pinch of salt would have really brought out the  
> flavor.
>
> Gunthar

But they ate butter upon bread--

from A feast full of sad cheere vvhere griefes are all on heape: where
sollace is full deere, and sorrowes are good cheape.
Churchyard, Thomas, 1520?-1604. published 1592.

Page 11

No Butter cleaues nor sticks vpon my bread,
No Honny-combes will breede in my bare hyue:
My gold but glasse, my siluer worse then lead,
My luck as bad as any man alyue;
-----------------------

A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes Wherof some are wonderfull,
some straunge, some pleasant, diuers necessary, a great sort profitable
and many very precious. ...
Lupton, Thomas. [1579]

Page 130   She abhorred then bread & butter, and other such natural  
foode.
---------------

The first and second volumes of Chronicles ... first collected and
published by Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and others: now
newlie augmented and continued (with manifold matters of singular note
and worthie memorie) to the yeare 1586. by Iohn Hooker ali?as Vowell
Gent and others. With conuenient tables at the end of these volumes.  
1587.

Page 93   When no butter could sticke on their bread, in in that part of
the citie
-------------

I have a collection of these quotes. You should have asked.

Johnnae


Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:15:00 -0400
From: Gretchen Beck <grm at andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Manchet
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

--On Tuesday, September 11, 2007 1:53 PM -0400 Johnna Holloway
<johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu> wrote:
> I have a collection of these quotes. You should have asked.

Coolness!  Here's a neat one from "Three Middle-English versions of the
Rule of St. Benet and two contemporary rituals for the ordination of  
nuns."
(found on the Corpus of Middle English website)

  ?a ?at serue o ?e kichin sal miste bi-fore ?e mikil mete bred, butter, ?at
tay may serue wid-vten gruching and wid-vten noy

(They that serve in the kitchen shall eat before the main meal [I think
that's what mikil mete translates to anyhow] bread and butter, that they
may serve without grouching [grumbling] and without suffering).

toodles, margaret


Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 05:47:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Beth Ann Bretter <ladypeyton at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] OOP: Cottage Cheese & Butter - US vs. Canada
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

<<< Or, what is the difference between US and "European" butter? I'm  
seeing "European" or "European style" butter show up in my grocery  
store alongside the salted and unsalted butter.  Is there a
real difference or is it just marketing hype? >>>

The fat content is higher, along with some other differences that I can't quite remember.  This month's Saveur magazine is dedicated to butter and there's a great article on European butter and how it is different from American.  There's also an article rating a number of European and American butters (it seems I need to move to Vermont).

Peyton 


Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 14:04:04 -0700
From: Lilinah <lilinah at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] OOP: Cottage Cheese & Butter - US vs. Canada
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

Stefan asked:
<<< Or, what is the difference between US and "European" butter? I'm
seeing "European" or "European style" butter show up in my grocery
store alongside the salted and unsalted butter.  Is there a real
difference or is it just marketing hype?  >>>

I get the digest, so this may have been answered already, but there 
can be several differences.

First, butters even from different regions in one country can taste 
difference, since the feed affects the flavor of the milk and cream.

Second, the breed of cow can also affect the flavor. Here in the US 
darned near every dairy cow is a Holstein - the black and white 
spotted ones. But there used to be a lot more different breeds - 
Holsteins are preferred because they produce a lot more milk. Other 
breeds produce more cream with the milk, and i assume that the flavor 
of the milk from different breeds can vary, too.

Third, for many European butters the cream is slightly sour, so the 
butter has a stronger flavor. Some dairies here in NoCal do this now, 
too, mostly organic ones.

One the other hand, this being the US and all, some of it may be 
marketing hype.

I recall when i was twelve i went to France with my parents (that was 
back in the spring of 1961). My parents didn't fly anywhere unless 
absolutely forced to. We went on the second Atlantic crossing of the 
"France", long before the poor old beauty devolved into a cruise 
ship. We were served butter from different regions in France with our 
meals, the region being specified on the menu.

When i lived in France in 1973, butter from different regions was 
available - i think i still have some of the wrappers, since they 
featured young women in "traditional" regional dress.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita


Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:03:56 -0400
From: euriol <euriol at ptd.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Since I am just delving into the cheese & butter making myself, I thought I
would try to dig for some information. I found a book on google books
titled "Milk, Cheese, and Butter: A Practical Handbook on their Properties
and the Processes of their Production". It was published in 1894, so the
whole text is public domain and available on books.google.com

On page 303 it says "But when the butter has been separated it may rapidly
become a prey to its enemies, hence the importance of ridding it of all
other matter fermented or capable of fermentation.... But even if these
were entirely removed, there would be nothing to hinder the action of air
ferments." And it goes on further. This would seem a good source on getting
information of butter storage.

On page 305 under item f it is labeled "Keeping quality". It says "Fine
butters, lightly salted, have been kept under the best natural conditions
for five or six weeks without passing out of the good stages; the majority
of butters would not keep so well for ten days, and many are spoiled within
half that time."

Page 322 has a discussion on the washings of the butter.

Euriol


Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:43:30 -0700
From: Susan Fox <selene at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

<<< So I'm mostly curious about the clarified butter.  Has anyone tested the
shelf life of it?  Should I add salt to the butter before clarifing?  After
clarifing?

Vitha >>>

Every India/Pakistani market has jars and jars of ghee, cooked clarified 
butter on the shelves at room temperature.  I keep it in my kitchen 
without refrigeration, and the only danger seems to be that it goes 
stale eventually. 

Don't bother salting clarified butter, it will just get filtered out.  
I'm big on salting food to taste at the table anyway.

Selene


Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:20:30 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

You might start out with C Anne Wilson's chapter on dairy foods and go from there or pick up a copy of The English Dairy Farmer 1500-1900 by G. E. Fussell.

Johnnae


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:08:51 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

There's this one  from *Ouverture de Cuisine*
(France, 1604 - Daniel Myers, trans.)
The original source can be found at MedievalCookery.com 
<http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ouverture.shtm>

To make May butter. Take a quart of new milk, & put it on the fire, & 
make it turn in /matton/: when it begins to boil take a dozen beaten 
eggs, & cast them therein, & let boil until it seems that the eggs are 
cooked: then cast all in linen, & let drip the water well out, & press 
well that it doesn't hold any water therein: then grind well in a stone 
mortar, with half a pound of new butter, & pass it through a strainer, 
put there a little rose water: when so passed it needs to be churned a 
long time, & put sugar therein, & arrange on little plates, & raise it a 
little high, & sugar thereon.

One can then use the May Butter for things like this:

This is an excerpt from *Das Kuchbuch der Sabina Welserin*
(Germany, 16th century - V. Armstrong, trans.)
The original source can be found at David Friedman's website 
<http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Sabrina_Welserin.html>

172 Pike in May butter. Take a pike, let it come to a boil in salted 
wine with water, and when it is half done, then draw the skin off of it 
and put the flesh in a pan and put a large amount of fresh butter, good 
wine, ginger and cinnamon thereon. Do not oversalt it and let it cook 
together. Do not make too much sauce.

Johnnae


Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
<<< I also remember a May butter reference, but, also, was trying to 
remember where I'd seen it, and didn't have a chance to go digging for 
it.

Adamantius >>>


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:56:51 -0400
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: carlton_bach at yahoo.de, Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

On Jun 24, 2008, at 7:23 AM, Volker Bach wrote:
<<< There is something in Meister Eberhard, but it requires rose petals  
to be infused in May butter hung up in the sun for a few weeks. The  
ingredient is may butter, not the result. Could that have been it?

Giano >>>

It sounds like what other people have referred to as May butter, but  
I'm probably remembering some secondary source, somebody like Reay  
Tannahill or C. Anne Wilson or one of those people...

Okay, here we go:

"In early summer May butter was prepared for the benefit of children.  
Thomas Cogan described how it was made by setting new, unsalted butter  
out on open platters out in the sun for twelve to fourteen days. This  
bleached out the colour and much of the vitamin A, and made the butter  
very rancid. But, it acquired extra vitamin D from exposure to the  
sun's rays, and thus had some curative power for children with rickets  
or pains in the joints. [21]"

"Ch. 5, 21: 	Cogan, p. 156; Sir J.C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, 'The  
Englishman's Food' (1939), p. 83."

The above quotes are from C. Anne Wilson's "Food and Drink in  
Britain", c. 1973 C. Anne Wilson, Academy Chicago Publishers, Chicago,  
1991.

It doesn't seem like there's a really good way to prove conclusively  
that this was done, but for those concerned with rancidity, it might  
be worth noting that some people do consume rancid butter by choice.  
The yak butter swirled into Tibetan tea, for example, is, IIRC,  
traditionally used in a slightly rancid state. Of course, if it should  
turn out that I read that in a book by C. Anne Wlson, I could be in  
trouble... ;-)

Adamantius


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:43:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doc <edoard at medievalcookery.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

--- "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius"
<adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:

On Jun 24, 2008, at 7:23 AM, Volker Bach wrote:
<<< There is something in Meister Eberhard, but it requires rose petals  
to be infused in May butter hung up in the sun for a few weeks. The  
ingredient is may butter, not the result. Could that have been it? >>>

I did a quick search through Eberhard and didn't find
any recipes for making May Butter.  There was one
recipe that called for it, but no details on the
butter itself.

The only recipe I could find called "May Butter" was
the one in Ouverture that Johnnae already posted.  It
sounds more like a dessert than preserved butter, and
says nothing about ageing it in the sun.

Okay, here we go:

<<< "In early summer May butter was prepared for the benefit of children.  
Thomas Cogan described how it was made by setting new, unsalted butter  
out on open platters out in the sun for twelve to fourteen days. This  
bleached out the colour and much of the vitamin A, and made the butter  
very rancid. But, it acquired extra vitamin D from exposure to the sun's rays, and thus had some curative power for children with rickets or pains in the joints. [21]"

"Ch. 5, 21: 	Cogan, p. 156; Sir J.C. Drummond and A.
Wilbraham, 'The Englishman's Food' (1939), p. 83."

The above quotes are from C. Anne Wilson's "Food and Drink in  
Britain", c. 1973 C. Anne Wilson, Academy Chicago Publishers, Chicago, 1991. >>>

So what we have here is a tertiary source (Wilson)
quoting another tertiary source (Drummond).  What's
more, "The Englishman's Food" is one of the root
sources for the Moldy-Meat-Myth.  Again, since vitamin
D was unknown before the 20th century (along with any
connection to rickets), and since butter can only
*lose* vitamin D over time, Drummond's statement is
certainly completely fabricated.

When I get home I'll check through my copy of Drummond
and see if he has any sources at all to back it up. 
I'll be really surprised if he does.  I'm used to
expecting fluff in Drummond's book.  Unfortunately
this makes me have to double check "facts" in Wilson's
book as well.

- Doc


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:22:16 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: edoard at medievalcookery.com,	Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Or one could just read what Thomas Cogan has to say.

Thomas Cogan, [1545?-1607] The haven of health is up as a searchable 
text in the 1636 edition.
There's an earlier 16th century edition here on the shelf, but this one 
from EEBO-TCP is easy to search and find the references in.

There are a number of May butter mentions such as:

For the Collicke take unset Leekes, blades and all, chop them small, 
boyle them in good white wine, with May Butter  or fresh  Butter, untill 
the wine be in a manner wasted away, then lay them abroad betweene a 
cleane linnen cloth plaisterwise on the belly, so hot as the patient may 
well abide it, and at the cooling of that, apply another hot plaister, 
and thus doe the third or fourth time together, if need shall so require.

But here  is the passage  for Drummond and Wilson--

Pages 181-182

The necessity of Butter in dressing of meates, in making of salves and 
oyntments, I overpasse, yet would I wish that such as have children to 
bring up, would not bee without May Butter in their houses. It is to bee 
made chiefly in May, or in the heat of the yeare, by setting Butter new 
made without salt, so much as you list in a platter, open to the Sunne 
in faire weather for certaine daies, untill it bee sufficiently 
clarified, and altered in colour, which will be in twelve or fourteene 
daies, if there be faire Sunne shining. This is of marvellous vertue in 
any exulceration, and I have knowne the wilde fire healed therewith, 
 being incorporate with Sage leaves. And for the ease of Infants to 
bring forth their teeth,  Galen adviseth us to rubbe their gummes 
oftentimes with fresh Butter, and thinketh it of no lesse force than 
Hony, for that purpose. Of the making of Butter is left a kinde of whey, 
which they commonly call Butter milke, or soure milke, which after it 
hath stood a time, becommeth soure, and is much used to bee eaten either 
of it selfe, or with sweet milke, especially in the Summer season, 
because it is cooling, and no doubt but that it is both moyst and 
nourishing, and cleanseth the brest and is shortly digested. Also with 
it is made together with sweet milke, a kinde of posset, which is called 
a posset of two milkes, or a soure milke posset, which is a very 
temperate and cooling drinke, and is used in hot diseases with great 
successe, and doth coole more than any other drinke, as is proved daily 
in Lankashire, where it is most usuall.

Johnnae


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:25:34 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Other references to May butter include:

Here foloweth good medycynes for the colde & the coughe.

TAke ysop Rosemary Planten and the roote of Radysshe of yche a quatyte & 
seth the in wyne fro a potell to a quarte & than take them downe & powre 
out the lycour into the her|bes in a morter & medle them wel togyder & 
strayne them into the lycour agayne into y^e potte & than take a pynte 
of lyfe Hony & boyle it & scomme it and put therto a quartro of 
Maybutter that is claryfyed & than let it sethe by the space that one 
may say the psalme of Miserere mei deus than take the vessell downe & 
strayne it throughe a lynen clothe & take that lycour & put it into a 
fayre vessell of glasse & let the pacyent vse therof fyrst and laste at 
euery tyme .vi. spones full of stale ale warme tyll he be hole for this 
is a proued medycyne.

Here begynneth a newe boke of medecynes. 1526

---------------

THis following is a notable tryed medicine for the gowte, and for the 
swelling of ioynts, & for knobs or knots comming of the French pocks. 
Take May butter a quarter of a pound, halfe a pound of coomyn seede, 
beaten in fyne powder, a quarter of a pound of blacke Sope, one handfull 
of Hearbe grace, halfe a handfull of clarifyed sheepe suet: stampe all 
these to|gether in a morter, then take the gall of an Oxe, and a 
spoonefull of bay Salt, and frye them all together, tyll it be thycke: 
then laye it on a woollen cloath, and so apply it to the ache, as hotte 
as it maye be suffred, and let it lye vnremoued a whole weeke: and then 
laye another plaster thereof to it, and let it lye vnre|moued as long: 
then lay the thyrd plaster therto, and let it lye therto as long, as the 
other, (which wyll be in the whole three weekes:) and without doubt it 
wyll helpe him. I haue seene it proued. This I had out of a verie olde 
booke. Page 96

A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes by Thomas Lupton, [1579]

----------

I checked Moffett, Thomas, 1553-1604. Healths improvement: or, Rules 
comprizing and discovering the nature, method, and manner of preparing 
all sorts of food used in this nation. from 1655 (written in the 
1590's-- the author died in 1605)

Butter is in Chapter 15 pages 128-131 but I found no mention of ?may 
butter.

Johnnae


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:42:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: Christiane <christianetrue at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org

Period-wise, and in relation to my own personal obsession, medieval Sicily, here's some notes about the use of butter in the island's cuisine from Clifford Wright: http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/recipes/display/bycategory.php/recipe_id/886/id/15/. (That recipe looks yummy, too; wish my husband was not lactose intolerant.)

I like the note about the use of butter during the festivals for the Erycinian Venus (Eryx is the modern-day town of Erice). Also the bit about the use of butter as a cheese substitute in Corleone. One thing my Sicilian grandmother always did was use butter instead of olive oil for her garlic bread. My Italian teacher in college, who was from Rome, was surprised when I told her that. Apparently that's not a common practice on the mainland and especially in Rome. I've wondered if the use of butter in this case was a holdover from the distant past, since she was from Corleone.

Gianotta


Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:52:37 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: edoard at medievalcookery.com,	Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

One of the things to remember about Drummond is that the man
was a biochemist and quite a famous one at that. In the 1930s, Drummond 
was responsible for isolating pure vitamin A.^ 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cecil_Drummond#cite_note-UCL02-9>
He took his knowledge of vitamins and then applied them to nutrition and 
then to the English diet. That research became "The Englishman's Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet" in 1939.

His co-author Anne Wilbraham became his second wife. Their affair broke up his first marriage. Jack and Anne married and their child Elizabeth was born in 1942. During the war he served as scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food.
He was knighted for his efforts in 1944 and even received the United States medal of freedom

In 1952 the family was murdered while on vacation in France.
That means that the 1939 and 1940 editions of the book were published 
during Drummond's lifetime. All other copies were published after his death. This also explains why the book was never revised in the 1950's or updated in the 1960's.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography /has quite a good biography 
on Drummond.

Johnnae

Doc wrote:
<<< However there apparently was no reference in the
original source to rickets.  The two ailments it
specifically mentioned were ulcers and "wild fire"
(which I take to mean a fever of some sort, though it
could also be a rash).  So this isn't a matter of an
medical treatment being arrived at empirically and
then being explained.  The concept of using May Butter
to stave off rickets was added by either Wilson or
Drummond, with no evidence given that it was practiced
in the middle ages at all. >>>


Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:10:53 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: <edoard at medievalcookery.com>,	"Cooks within the SCA"
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

<<< However there apparently was no reference in the
original source to rickets.  The two ailments it
specifically mentioned were ulcers and "wild fire"
(which I take to mean a fever of some sort, though it
could also be a rash).  So this isn't a matter of an
medical treatment being arrived at empirically and
then being explained.  The concept of using May Butter
to stave off rickets was added by either Wilson or
Drummond, with no evidence given that it was practiced
in the middle ages at all. 

- Doc >>>

Wild fire is erysipelas AKA Saint Anthony's Fire.

Bear


Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:57:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Butter
To: edoard at medievalcookery.com,	"Cooks within the SCA"
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

OED quote:
1718 QUINCY Dispens. III. xi. 476 Butyrum Majale, May Butter. This is made
by melting fresh Butter that has been made up without any Salt, in the
Sun; which is to be repeated until it grows of a whitish Colour. This is a
very trifling Medicine, and of no use but as any simple Unguent, or plain
Lard may be.

May-butter
   a. Unsalted butter preserved in the month of May and sometimes used
medicinally (see quots. 1615, 1718).
?a1425 (1373) J. LELAMOUR tr. Macer Herbal f. 20v, Fry ham with may buttyr
and a litell alym. a1500 in G. Henslow Med. Wks. 14th Cent. (1899) 127
Medle hem with may~botere..made as {th}e melke come{th} fro the cow{ygh}e.
1584 T. COGAN Hauen of Health cxcvi. 158 Yet would I wish that such as
haue children to bring vp, would not be without May Butter in their
houses. 1614 G. MARKHAM Cheape & Good Husb. I. lx. 37 Take the leaues of
wilde Nepe..and beating them in a mortar with May-Butter, apply it. 1615
G. MARKHAM Eng. House-wife II. iv. 113 If during the month of May before
you salt your butter you saue a lumpe thereof and put it into a vessell,
and so set it into the sunne the space of that moneth, you shall finde it
exceeding..medicinable for wounds. 1660
-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa


Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:58:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doc <edoard at medievalcookery.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Drummond on Butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

So I finally get home and open the copy of Drummond, and here's what  
he has to say on the topic (presented in its entirety):

[p.73]

    "Butter was much more extensively used for cooking than as a table  
food.  It was recommended for growing pains in children and for  
constipation.

    <<Sweete-butter wholesome is as some haue taught,
    To cleanse and purge some paines that inward be.[2]>>

    <<Now butter with a leaf of sage is good to purge the blood.[3]>>

[2] The School of Salernum, translated by Sir John Harington, 1608.
[3] The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Act IV, Scene v, Francis  
Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625)

[p.74]

    "The rancid state of the greater part that was sold would account  
for its reputation as a strong laxative.

    "It was usually made early in summer and 'May Butter' was regarded  
not only as the best but as the most wholesome. '... yet would I wish  
that such as have children to bring up, would not bee without May  
Butter in their houses'.[1]  There is some confusion about the term  
'May Butter', for it is sometimes used of butter made at that time of  
the year, and sometimes of a curious product resembling the Indian / 
ghee/.

    <<It is to bee made chiefly in May, or in the heate of the yeare, by  
setting Butter new made without salt, so much as you list in a  
platter, open to the Sunne in faire weather for certain daies, untill  
it bee sufficiently clarified, and altered in colour, which wil be in  
twelve or fourteene daies, if it be faire Sunne shining.[2]>>

    "Such treatment would cause all the natural pigment (carotene) and  
the associated vitamin A to be destroyed by oxidation.  A good deal  
of rancidity would also occur.  It is difficult, therefore, to  
understand why such a product, all its vitamin A content gone and  
reeking of rancidity, should have been so highly recommended.   
Exposure to the sun's rays would tend to increase the amount of  
vitamin D present and it is possible that the beneficial effect of   
'May Butter', discovered empirically, was due to its antirachitic  
properties.  This may explain why it was sometimes used in the spring  
to relieve pain in the joints."

[1]&[2] The Haven of Health, Thomas Cogan, 1584

=====

As with a lot of "The Englishman and His Food", Drummond here has  
mixed some useful information with conjecture and unsubstantiated  
claims.

Assertions made without substantiation:
1.  Butter was used medicinally for growing pains
2.  Most butter sold was rancid
3.  Butter left out for 12-14 days would have "a good deal of rancidity"
    (I don't say this isn't true, but I intend to find out)
4.  Rancid butter has a laxative effect
    (I don't say this isn't true, and I'm not sure I want to find out)
5.  "May Butter" was used in the spring to relieve pain in the joints
6.  Rickets was a problem in the middle ages
7.  "May Butter" was used in the middle ages for its antirachitic  
properties
8.  "May Butter" has antirachitic properties

I think the assertion that bothers me the most is #2, since it is so  
reminiscent of the Moldy-Meat-Myth.  They've got butter being sold,  
but they hold onto it until it's rancid before selling it?  The  
butter's rancid, but nevertheless they use a lot of it?  Feh!

- Doc


Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:15:04 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Drummond on Butter
To: edoard at medievalcookery.com,	Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Butter tends to be a product that was made and consumed locally, so
one might in fact encounter excess rancid butter being sold for cash in 
urban markets.

We might look for legislation regarding the sale of "off" butter just as
we can already find regulations regarding fish and meats. I don't have time
today to prowl through sources and look.

12-14 days in sunlight -- so what the temperature during those of days
of May during the medieval period? You may be talking temps in the 40's.

I came across mention yesterday that butter was given for gout. Arthritis
is probably mentioned in the long lists of uses that I didn't copy over.

There's a paper in Woolgar's Food in Medieval England: Diet and 
Nutrition (Medieval History and Archaeology)
that discusses rickets in the middle ages. Rickets does turn up in the 
skeletons of children who died in the period.

The details about Vitamin A make sense as of course that was Drummond's 
great discovery.

Johnnae


Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:09:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Lawrence Bayne <shonsu_78 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] lard vs. olive oil vs. butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Reading somewhere a long time ago; The Romans came up with "margarine" centuries ago by mixing small amounts of lard/indigenous animal fats, with butter, salting the mixture, and then wrapping with parchment and keeping the total submerged inside water barrels. This managed to extend the butter supply for weeks rather than days. I Wish I could remember where I read it.

Lothar


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:56:13 -0400
From: "tudorpot at gmail.com" <tudorpot at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

<<< I like the idea of the butter sculpting/molding, although without this 
evidence I would have said it was more likely to be French or 
Victorian British. >>>

Butter sculpture goes back to AD 641 in China.
http://www.yangshuochina.com/HistoryCulture/FolkArts/2226.html

Theodora


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:20:45 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I did the honey butter research back in late 2006-2007 because His Royal
Majesty let it be known that he preferred honey butter above
all other treats. (The Midrealm preference of decades past continues you see
into the 21st century.)  I had come across the butter sculpture references in Doc's translation of /"Ouverture de Cuisine" /and /// /filed them away for a 
rainy research day. (One never  knows when one  will need something to write about.)

The Ouverture butter sculpture references are of course quite
appropriate. The passage describes
"THE BANQUET OF THE ENTRANCE of Monsieur Robert de Berges Count of 
Walhain, Esquire & Prince of Liege, made in the palace in Liege, the 
year 1557 in the month of December..."
It's quite a description. The book was actually written in the mid 1580's, according to Scully. It was finally published in 1604.
Doc's translation really should have opened the door to more work on it 
and its recipes but it's not been the subject of much comment or work.

 The original article as submitted actually originally led off, I think 
with the references to butter sculpture, but it was edited in this
fashion in this publication to focus on the aspects of honey butter.

The lions were created for 12th Night 2007; the swans were created for Crown 2007.
I also created another honey butter lion that was gold dusted for the Coronation that was held in between.
The swans were dusted with gold dust, and in the original photograph 
against the blue background they do look golden. (Patrick Photoshopped the background out for publication.)
 The subtletie was actually the size of a regular dinner
plate, so it's not as large as it looked. There was quite a bit written 
up about the subtleties in 2007. That can be found in the files in the SCA Subtleties list.

Glad you liked it.

Johnnae

Stefan li Rous wrote:
I don't remember this article being mentioned before, but I could have 
just missed it. I don't always have the time to go explore all the 
interesting links folks post here. It is worth reading, folks.
<<< The article is: Honey Butter and Butter Sculptures 
http://www.midrealm.org/pentamere/pdfs/Gauntlet_Jan-Mar08.pdf >>>

I like the idea of the butter sculpting/molding, although without this 
evidence I would have said it was more likely to be French of 
Victorian British.

The photograph in the newsletter of the swans is interesting. A lot of 
butter for one table though, even the headtable. Was it later divied 
up and passed around to the other tables? Also, on my screen at least, 
the gold dust looks more like a sprinkling of paprika than gold. Or 
was it more golden/shiny in real life?

These butter sculptures might not work in the outdoor summer feast we 
were discussing, but I like the idea.

Stefan


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:26:08 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Doc's Ouverture  de Cuisine translation can be  found at
http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ouverture.html

The butter sculpture descriptions can be found at the end of
the translation, right before you get to the index.

Johnnae


Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:09:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Lawrence Bayne <shonsu_78 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] lard vs. olive oil vs. butter
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Reading somewhere a long time ago; The Romans came up with "margarine" centuries ago by mixing small amounts of lard/indigenous animal fats, with butter, salting the mixture, and then wrapping with parchment and keeping the total submerged inside water barrels. This managed to extend the butter supply for weeks rather than days. I Wish I could remember where I read it.

Lothar


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:56:13 -0400
From: "tudorpot at gmail.com" <tudorpot at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

<<< I like the idea of the butter sculpting/molding, although without this 
evidence I would have said it was more likely to be French or 
Victorian British. >>>

Butter sculpture goes back to AD 641 in China.
http://www.yangshuochina.com/HistoryCulture/FolkArts/2226.html

Theodora


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:20:45 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I did the honey butter research back in late 2006-2007 because His Royal
Majesty let it be known that he preferred honey butter above
all other treats. (The Midrealm preference of decades past continues you see
into the 21st century.)  I had come across the butter sculpture references in Doc's translation of /"Ouverture de Cuisine" /and /// /filed them away for a 
rainy research day. (One never  knows when one  will need something to write about.)

The Ouverture butter sculpture references are of course quite
appropriate. The passage describes
"THE BANQUET OF THE ENTRANCE of Monsieur Robert de Berges Count of 
Walhain, Esquire & Prince of Liege, made in the palace in Liege, the 
year 1557 in the month of December..."
It's quite a description. The book was actually written in the mid 1580's, according to Scully. It was finally published in 1604.
Doc's translation really should have opened the door to more work on it 
and its recipes but it's not been the subject of much comment or work.

 The original article as submitted actually originally led off, I think 
with the references to butter sculpture, but it was edited in this
fashion in this publication to focus on the aspects of honey butter.

The lions were created for 12th Night 2007; the swans were created for Crown 2007.
I also created another honey butter lion that was gold dusted for the Coronation that was held in between.
The swans were dusted with gold dust, and in the original photograph 
against the blue background they do look golden. (Patrick Photoshopped the background out for publication.)
 The subtletie was actually the size of a regular dinner
plate, so it's not as large as it looked. There was quite a bit written 
up about the subtleties in 2007. That can be found in the files in the SCA Subtleties list.

Glad you liked it.

Johnnae

Stefan li Rous wrote:
I don't remember this article being mentioned before, but I could have 
just missed it. I don't always have the time to go explore all the 
interesting links folks post here. It is worth reading, folks.
<<< The article is: Honey Butter and Butter Sculptures 
http://www.midrealm.org/pentamere/pdfs/Gauntlet_Jan-Mar08.pdf >>>

I like the idea of the butter sculpting/molding, although without this 
evidence I would have said it was more likely to be French of 
Victorian British.

The photograph in the newsletter of the swans is interesting. A lot of 
butter for one table though, even the headtable. Was it later divied 
up and passed around to the other tables? Also, on my screen at least, 
the gold dust looks more like a sprinkling of paprika than gold. Or 
was it more golden/shiny in real life?

These butter sculptures might not work in the outdoor summer feast we 
were discussing, but I like the idea.

Stefan


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:26:08 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Honey butter was  lunch ideas- feedback
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Doc's Ouverture  de Cuisine translation can be  found at
http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ouverture.html

The butter sculpture descriptions can be found at the end of
the translation, right before you get to the index.

Johnnae


Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 06:49:56 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at att.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

<<< Another thing in the recipe that has me wondering is the mention of "cow 
butter". Is there no general term for "butter" in Spanish? Or do recipes 
tend to call out specific types of butter? >>>

Manteca or mantequilla, although, I believe, here in the U.S. you are more 
likely to encounter manteca being used as the short form of manteca de cerdo 
or lard.  I would say the cook is being very specific about the butter to 
achieve a certain effect.

<<< Other than things like salted butter or unsalted butter, (well and 
Icelandic fermented butter, which we've discussed), I didn't realize that 
there were different types of butter from different animals. I know that 
cheese is often made from sheep's milk or goat's milk, but I've not heard 
of goat or sheep butter before. I don't remember seeing other butters in 
my grocery store. But maybe it is available in some ethnic stores? >>>

Butter type is largely a cultural thing based on the most common 
domesticated animals in a culture.  Butter has been produced from cows, 
sheep, goats, water buffalos, yaks, and even camels.  The general 
American/European bias toward cow butter is most probably an artifact of 
availability, quantity, and fat content.  The French, being their contrarian 
Gallic selves, also produce goat butter (IIRC).

<<< Do we see "sheep" or "goat" butter called out in some medieval recipes?

Are there certain milks which won't coagulate into butter? What about 
human milk?

Stefan >>>

Butter is made from cream rather than milk and is a condensed, emulsified 
fat.  ISTR, that there are mammal milks which do not contain enough fat to 
make cream and that human milk is among them, but I would suggest 
researching that rather than take my spotty memories as gospel.

Bear 


Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:40:39 -0700
From: "Rikke D. Giles" <rgiles at centurytel.net>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

On 06/03/2010 09:58:07 AM, Donna Green wrote:
<<< Butter is made from cream rather than milk and is a
condensed, emulsified fat. >>>

<< Since goat milk is, as I understand it, naturally homogenized and does
not separate into cream, does that mean it is harder or not possible
to make goat milk butter?

Juana Isabella >>

In real life, I own a small, private, goat dairy.  I make cheese, 
butter, yogurt and more from the milk.

Goat milk does separate, it just takes longer.  I let it sit on the 
counter, at room temp (in western WA state, so we are talking anywhere 
from 60-70 F), for a day or two and skim off the risen cream.  There is 
still plenty of cream left in the milk to make a semi-skim cheese.  

Some people let the milk sit in their refrigerator, which is safer in 
warm climates.  I don't bother, because I use raw milk and while it's 
sitting on the countertop it's culturing for both the butter and the 
cheese. 

Goat milk also separates easily with a standard cream separator.   I 
just haven't bought one yet.

Aelianora


Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:36:54 -0700
From: lilinah at earthlink.net
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

Aelianora wrote:
<<< In real life, I own a small, private, goat dairy. I make cheese,
butter, yogurt and more from the milk.

Goat milk does separate, it just takes longer. I let it sit on the
counter, at room temp (in western WA state, so we are talking anywhere
from 60-70 F), for a day or two and skim off the risen cream. There is
still plenty of cream left in the milk to make a semi-skim cheese.

Some people let the milk sit in their refrigerator, which is safer in
warm climates. I don't bother, because I use raw milk and while it's
sitting on the countertop it's culturing for both the butter and the
cheese.

Goat milk also separates easily with a standard cream separator. I
just haven't bought one yet. >>>

SCA-period Ottoman recipes frequently call for butter in both savory 
and sweet recipes.

Ewes supplied most milk, and sheep in general provided most meat (the 
price of sheep meat was maintained at a low price by Ottoman market 
regulations) and the most common cooking fat, sheep tail fat in the 
Ottoman world.

The palace bought beef only once per year, using it only to make 
bastirma, forerunner of pastrami... and personally i prefer Armenian 
and Turkish bastirma. In SCA period, and into the 17th c., the cattle 
generally came from the Balkans, a long and arduous cattle drive, as 
some literature points out. Cow dairies were not common near 
Kostantiniyye (Constantinople, now Istanbul) until some ways into the 
17th c. And i haven't read anything to suggest that the Palace kept 
its own cow herds, although perhaps they had a some animals.

Of course, since they are from the Palace, the sultan's cooks would 
have access to difficult to get ingredients, brought in from great 
distances, perhaps including cow's milk butter. But this makes me 
wonder if perhaps some of the butter came from ewe's milk, as did 
most of the yogurt and cheeses.

When i cook for large numbers of people i use more reasonable priced 
cow's milk yogurt and butter (gotta keep on budget). For cooking 
classes, however, i often bring a small container (since all i can 
find are small containers) of ewe's milk yogurt and pass it around so 
people can taste the difference between it and cow's milk yogurt. It 
behaves differently in cooking, too, as at least one recipe points 
out, recommending the addition of a little wheat starch to cow's milk 
yogurt so it won't curdle/separate when subjected to high heat, but 
no need to add starch if using ewe's milk.

Now i wonder if i could make butter from ewe's milk. What is 
available in shops is pasteurized... can one still let it separate or 
does the high heat make that impossible? I know i couldn't separate 
it if it were homogenized, but i suspect it isn't homogenized... i'll 
have to check next time i'm in the market.
-- 
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita


Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 17:00:18 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker at att.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

<<< Butter is made from cream rather than milk and is a
condensed, emulsified fat. >>>

<< Since goat milk is, as I understand it, naturally homogenized and does not 
separate into cream, does that mean it is harder or not possible to make 
goat milk butter?

Juana Isabella >>

It is my understanding that goat milk has smaller fat globules than cow's 
milk and doesn't seperate as easily, but it will seperate naturally given 
time (up to three or four days), producing goat cream.  The seperated cream 
can then be used to make goat butter.  A mechanical seperator is usually 
used to speed the process.  Goat's milk has a higher fat content than cow's 
milk, so it should produce a very nice, but time consuming butter.

Goat butter has been produced since Antiquity, so there should be a 
description of the process before mechanical seperators.

Bear 


Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 18:43:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: wheezul at canby.com
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

<<< Another thing in the recipe that has me wondering is the mention of "cow
butter". Is there no general term for "butter" in Spanish? Or do recipes
tend to call out specific types of butter? >>>

Thanks for bringing up the question of butter, because I too have some! 
First, I did go spend the time to read through the florilegium files and I
learned quite a bit from it - thanks everyone!

In Anna Wecker's cookbook (I am now up to almost all of part 3 creating an
ingredient list) - she specifies in a recipe to use butter, and that goat
butter is preferred if available.  She also mentions cow, goat and sheep
milks and cheeses.  I like her style of cooking - she says something like
'use this if you have it, or substitute x, y or z if you don't'.  Very few
of her recipes have rigid guidelines for measurements.

Specific questions I have are terminology related to fats.  The most
prominent fat reference is to schmaltz which since I haven't found a
'tell' in the recipes I consider an animal fat - probably pork, but could
certainly fall into the 'what you have on hand' category as well from pan
drippings.  She mentions sweet almond oil specifically, and I don't seem
to recall a reference to olive oil yet in the work.

She also calls out for 4 types of butter (or 5 if you count the goat
butter) - "butter", "anken", "sweet butter" and "May Butter".  To go back
to the florilegium commentary, the citations by the compilers in several
of the period German cookbooks I have been reading tell that May Butter
refers to the fattest butters of the year because the cows gave the most
milk fat in May.  In terms of Wecker's recipes, especially in how to make
almond "May Mushes" that include extra butter or cream than the more
regular mushes made with more or less the same ingredients, there is no
hint that the freshest May Butter used in the rather nummy looking almond
torte was meant to have medicinal value.

I am confused by the interchangeability of the terms anken (which my
dictionaries show as butter) or butter itself.  I just finished
translating an inventory of 1528 of the Bishop of Strassburg's effects. 
In the cellar are 4 pots of schmaltz and 2 pots of anken - so probably
different things entirely.  If anken is butter, than why does Anna switch
between anken and butter?  If anken was preserved butter, that might make
sense...

So would 'sweet butter' mean freshly made butter?  Or would it mean that
it wasn't allowed to sour at all as in the overnight step?  Or was the
stored butter of a sour quality?  There is also a keg of 'gumpost'
(compost) which my books suggest was a tub of soured milk.

One last question from me.  When I experimented with making croissants a
while back, one internet source said that European butter was drier than
the US butter.  Is there a way of drying ours out more?

Katherine in An Tir


Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 22:54:20 -0400
From: Robin Carroll-Mann <rcarrollmann at gmail.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:27 AM, Mark S. Harris
<MarkSHarris at austin.rr.com> wrote:
<<< Another thing in the recipe that has me wondering is the mention of "cow butter". Is there no general term for "butter" in Spanish? Or do recipes tend to call out specific types of butter? >>>

Sorry for being late to the party.  It's been a busy couple of days.
I've consulted some Spanish language resources, specifically:

Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espa?ola by Sebasti?n de Covarrubias
Orozco, 1610
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaObra.html?Ref=18011&portal=0
This is the oldest published glossary of the Spanish language.

The dictionaries of the Royal Academia Espa?ola (RAE)
http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle
The first edition was published between 1726 and 1739.  The link above
will let you search a word in any or all of the editions from 1726 to
1992.

Corpus del Espa?ol
http://www.corpusdelespanol.org
This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100
million words in more than 20,000 Spanish texts from the 1200s to the
1900s.

OK.  I'm not going to go into details about what I found where.
Here's my overview of the etymology of "manteca" and related words.

Manteca means animal fat.  The default is pig fat or lard, which is
sometimes written out in full as "manteca de cerdo".

A secondary usage is "manteca de ganado", which is the fat from milk
-- ie., butter.  "Ganado" translates as "cattle", and can mean any of
the herd animals such as cows, goats, sheep, and buffalo.  There are
citations in the Corpus del Espa?ol for all of the above kinds of
butter within our period, but cow butter is the most common.

"Mantequilla" is the modern Spanish word for butter.  The word
"mantequilla" first appears in the 16th century, but its primary
meaning was some kind of paste made with butter.  It doesn't seem to
have become *the* term for butter until sometime in the 20th century.

<<< Do we see "sheep" or "goat" butter called out in some medieval recipes? >>>

The examples I saw in Corpus del Espa?ol were all from medical
sources.  Sheep butter used in a poultice, for instance.  I do not
remember seeing butter other than cow in any of the Spanish cooking
sources, but I won't swear that there are none.  I will state that if
there are any, they are rare.

Brighid ni Chiarain


Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 18:47:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Honour Horne-Jaruk <jarukcomp at yahoo.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

--- On Thu, 6/3/10, Juana Isabella wrote:
<<< Since goat milk is, as I understand it, naturally
homogenized and does not separate into cream, does that mean
it is harder or not possible to make goat milk butter?

Juana Isabella >>>

    Yes, it's harder. unless you let the milk sour (which does help the cream rise; but with goat butter OMG the taste!) you essentially end up churning straight from the milk, which means it takes much longer. We now have cream separators which can wring every last speck of cream out of the milk, which makes things much easier.

    I must use "alternative" dairy products, because I can't tolerate cow's milk casein. Goat's milk butter comes in two basic types: 1)Revolting-- the buck lives with the does, and the butter tastes just like he smells. 2)Very mild and quite unobjectionable-- the goat lives on a different farm and the does are milked separately for a week after being bred. For some reason, it doesn't seem to come in a middle version.

Yours in service to both the Societies of which I am a member-
(Friend) Honour Horne-Jaruk, R.S.F.
Alizaundre de Brebeuf, C.O.L. S.C.A.- AKA Una the wisewoman, or That Pict


Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:20:28 +0200
From: "Susanne Mayer" <susanne.mayer5 at chello.at>
To: <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] cow butter?

Schmalz (in Germany and Austria most likely rendered porkfat) can also be 
Butterschmalz with the butter omitted:  rendered butter akin to ghee.
karapfen or other sweet yeast dough bakery goods baked in fat today uses 
either pork and or butter-schmalz or a mix of both,  Butterschmalz gives 
Krapfen the buttery taste without burning the dough.

4 types of butter:

I would assume that sweet butter is like today made from sweet (cream) and 
not soured (sourcream) milk.
May and Summer butter is made from milk collected during May (spring 
pastures are very rich in herbs) and "summer" meaning milk from Cows out to 
pasture or having been fed at least on fresh grass and has a distinct, 
richer flavor (especially may butter).
I have not yet come across the term of anken but it seems still to be used 
for butter in Switzerland. (see alemanisch wiki 
http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter)

as to goat butter: the one I got here in our bio food store was white, 
goaty, and not very *fatty* in texture. For a middle european used to only 
cow butter very strange tasting.

Katharina

Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 01:54:52 -0500
From: Sam Wallace <guillaumedep@gmail.com>
To: sca-cooks@lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] some liver and other offal recipes

> What is the "black butter"? You seem to have used just regular butter.

<<< I suspect in this case it is butter that has been heated until it 
turns brown.
...
Bear >>>

Bear, your suspicion is correct. That is just what I found when I 
researched the recipe originally and what I use when I make the dish.

Guillaume


Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 01:54:52 -0500
From: Sam Wallace <guillaumedep@gmail.com>
To: sca-cooks@lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] some liver and other offal recipes

> What is the "black butter"? You seem to have used just regular butter.

<<< I suspect in this case it is butter that has been heated until it 
turns brown.
...
Bear >>>

Bear, your suspicion is correct. That is just what I found when I 
researched the recipe originally and what I use when I make the dish.

Guillaume


Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:30:22 -0500
From: Galefridus Peregrinus <galefridus@optimum.net>
To: sca-cooks@lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Clarified butter

So I'm initiating a new experiment: I'm trying to make smen, or aged clarified butter -- a Moroccan/Berber cooking fat and condiment. It's basically ghee made from goats milk butter, but it's supposed to be aged for a while before using.

In any case, I obtained some unsalted goats milk butter, melted it, let it simmer gently until all the water had evaporated and the solids had browned slightly. Then I filtered it into a jar with a bit of salt in it to absorb any remaining water, let it sit for a day or two, and filtered it a second time. The end product is very pale, not at all yellow like the cow ghee available at the local South Asian grocery. The jar is now sitting in a cool, dark area of my basement, where I will let it age for a while. Traditionally, Berber families bury a jar of smen on the birth of a daughter and dig it up on her wedding day. I don't plan on waiting that long, but I'll give it at least a year before I use it. I'll let the list know what I find when I retrieve the stuff from its hiding place.

-- Galefridus


Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 14:08:56 -0500
From: "Terry Decker" <t.d.decker@att.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks@lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] sheep fat

Clarified butter has a smoking point of 485 F, which is over 100 degrees higher that of butter and can be as much as 160 degrees higher.  Perry is talking some seriously high temp cooking.

Bear

<<< Okay, why "clarified butter" instead of just "butter"? What's in the butter solids that you wouldn't want, that is not also in [sheep tail] fat?

I would think you might be able to use a mixture of butter (or clarified butter) and some regular sheep fat and get back some of the sheep flavor as compared to using just butter.

Stefan >>>


From the fb "SCA Cooks" group:

Jenn L Miller
5/26/19
Greetings. I am trying to find information on making butter in late 16th century England. Items of interest include directions from primary sources on making butter, types of butter churns (I have already found illumination sources on Larsdattir), and what May-butter is. If anyone can help with any of this information I would be most grateful. Thank you.

James Prescott 
From Lancelot de Casteau's "Ouverture de Cuisine", printed 1604, recipes are from Liège (modern Belgium) from about 1545 to about 1590. Translation by James Prescott.

184. To make May butter.
Take a quart of new milk, and put it on the fire, and make it turn lumpy: when it begins to boil take a dozen beaten eggs, and pour them in, and let boil until it seems to you that the eggs are cooked. Then pour all in a linen cloth, and let the water drip well out, and press well so that no water remains in it. Then grind well in a stone mortar, with half a pound of new butter, and strain it through cheesecloth, adding a bit of rose water. Being thus strained it is necessary to beat it a long time, and add sugar, and arrange it on some small plates, and lift it a bit high, and sprinkle sugar on top.

James Prescott 
My notes for my translation:
May butter [beurre de May] In England May butter is butter left in the sun for days (Black 131); “unsalted butter preserved in the month of May for medicinal use” by putting it in a vessel and setting it in the sun for the month (OED). Butter was at its highest quality in May (de la Reynière 103). Scappi says that butter “will be much better in May than in any other month” (Scappi VI.144).

Rumpolt provides no recipe, but uses "May butter" in a number of recipes.

James Prescott 
I can give more details for the citations if you need.

Jenn L Miller 
That would be wonderful. Thank you so much!

James Prescott 
Black, Maggie. The Medieval Cookbook. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992.
OED is Oxford English Dictionary.

de la Reynière, Grimod. Almanach des Gourmands. Paris: Maradan, 1804. Online facsimile: Google Books.

Scappi, Bartolomeo. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi: 1570. Translated by Terence Scully. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Jenn L Miller 
Thank you so much! I did also just come across this "If during the month of May before you salt your but∣ter you saue a lumpe thereof, and put it into a vessell, and so set it into the sunne the space of that moneth, you shall finde it exceeding soueraigne & medicinable for wounds, straines, aches, and such like grieuances." in the Early English Books Online database at http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A06913.0001.001

Allison Skewes 
I have a ton of research up on my website about the processes here https://thenewcut.wordpress.com/from-udder-to-butter/ Markham is a great resource

Johnna Holloway 
A search on 'Oxford symposium food and cookery butter' in Google Books pulls up dozens of papers given at the Oxford Symposium that mention butter. Many are now available to read or download for free.

Johnna Holloway 
Have you read the new books on butter, which have appeared recently? Butter: A Rich History and Bread & Butter are two.



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Edited by Mark S. Harris	butter-msg	Page 2 of 81