![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Explaining Zombie Ancestry History
Jan. 3rd, 2012 03:40 pmIf it were a bit less warm, I would present a critical argument here, quoting liberally from the thoughts of people concerning my Zombie Ancestry post. This is because the post was not about the question of whether people ate dangerously decayed food in the Middle Ages. We have regulations to prove that butchers got into trouble for selling such stuff. We have recipes that give us an indication of how flavours were perceived. I'm not going to go into the difference between something with evidence (how much given spices cost, relative to each other and relative to the things that they spice, how much tax on which comestible under what circumstances, what sort of legislation, what sort of cooking and preserving techniques, what sort of recipes) and arguments based on intense feeling but not much evidence because that's the stuff of articles and I have other articles I need to write right now (and books, and dissertations). Also, I've made enough people angry already.
The question that haunts me of the ones raised is the matter of "What if they think something's OK and we think it's not." It's almost impossible to compare subjective taste across time periods without tangible evidence. Would Medieval meat have appeared rancid to us? we don't know without being able to actually taste something cooked by someone who was cooking for their society, not in our society as an attempt to copy theirs.
Zombie Ancestry theory started for me as students and readers putting their assumptions of might have happened ahead of the evidence. When anyone arguing with me on the subject gives me evidence (not rational deduction - which has its place, but that place is to demonstrate that something is theoretically possible, not that something actually happened in a certain way) then I'm happy.
I wasn't arguing the history of mouthfeel of meat, or meat hygiene. I was talking about how people perceive the Middle Ages and how those preconceptions colour their judgement and create the belief in a type of society that isn't the one that actually existed. I was using the meat example AS AN EXAMPLE - and one that has been discussed by scholars in the field for a goodly time and has, as some of you pointed out (here and on FB), been debunked. I could have used chastity belts or flat Earth theory equally effectively.
If I had been looking closely at the subject of meat preparation in and of itself, I would not have talked about ancestors, but about regulations and recipes and pictures and flavour balance and a whole heap of other things. Since I'm taking a break from researching food history for a bit, I'm going to take the easy way out of this one and not really enter into a discussion at all. What I need a good discussion on this afternoon is the role of arbitration in small religious towns in the Languedoc in the early fourteenth century. After dinner, my topic will be the relationship of fiction writers with history (again). Food was not supposed to be on the menu this week - I'm just too busy.
As a sop, here's a present. This is just one example of what a manuscript actually said about meat (Forme of Cury, transliteration by Hieatt et al, with occasional letter changes by me, because I can't work out how to get all the characters into LJ). If you want to use it as a basis for argument, go for it.
This is the complete method as we know it for this recipe, which includes all the dealing with salt and all the drowning in spices and everything else that discussion about the other post has brought forward. If these things aren't mentioned, then they are (as far as we know) not part of the recipe, unless you can demonstrate that this recipe is atypical and that it actually is part of other, similar recipes. It's a lateish recipe, because I thought you'd rather have something in English.
Egurdouce
Take connynges or kydde, and smyte hem on pecys rawe, and fry hem in white grece. Take raysouns of coraunce and fry hem. Take oynouns, perboile hem and hewe hem small and fry hem. Take rede wyne and a lytel vynegur, sugur with powdour of peper, of gynger, of canel, salt; and cast therto, and lat it seeth with a gode quantite of white grece, & serve it forth.
The question that haunts me of the ones raised is the matter of "What if they think something's OK and we think it's not." It's almost impossible to compare subjective taste across time periods without tangible evidence. Would Medieval meat have appeared rancid to us? we don't know without being able to actually taste something cooked by someone who was cooking for their society, not in our society as an attempt to copy theirs.
Zombie Ancestry theory started for me as students and readers putting their assumptions of might have happened ahead of the evidence. When anyone arguing with me on the subject gives me evidence (not rational deduction - which has its place, but that place is to demonstrate that something is theoretically possible, not that something actually happened in a certain way) then I'm happy.
I wasn't arguing the history of mouthfeel of meat, or meat hygiene. I was talking about how people perceive the Middle Ages and how those preconceptions colour their judgement and create the belief in a type of society that isn't the one that actually existed. I was using the meat example AS AN EXAMPLE - and one that has been discussed by scholars in the field for a goodly time and has, as some of you pointed out (here and on FB), been debunked. I could have used chastity belts or flat Earth theory equally effectively.
If I had been looking closely at the subject of meat preparation in and of itself, I would not have talked about ancestors, but about regulations and recipes and pictures and flavour balance and a whole heap of other things. Since I'm taking a break from researching food history for a bit, I'm going to take the easy way out of this one and not really enter into a discussion at all. What I need a good discussion on this afternoon is the role of arbitration in small religious towns in the Languedoc in the early fourteenth century. After dinner, my topic will be the relationship of fiction writers with history (again). Food was not supposed to be on the menu this week - I'm just too busy.
As a sop, here's a present. This is just one example of what a manuscript actually said about meat (Forme of Cury, transliteration by Hieatt et al, with occasional letter changes by me, because I can't work out how to get all the characters into LJ). If you want to use it as a basis for argument, go for it.
This is the complete method as we know it for this recipe, which includes all the dealing with salt and all the drowning in spices and everything else that discussion about the other post has brought forward. If these things aren't mentioned, then they are (as far as we know) not part of the recipe, unless you can demonstrate that this recipe is atypical and that it actually is part of other, similar recipes. It's a lateish recipe, because I thought you'd rather have something in English.
Egurdouce
Take connynges or kydde, and smyte hem on pecys rawe, and fry hem in white grece. Take raysouns of coraunce and fry hem. Take oynouns, perboile hem and hewe hem small and fry hem. Take rede wyne and a lytel vynegur, sugur with powdour of peper, of gynger, of canel, salt; and cast therto, and lat it seeth with a gode quantite of white grece, & serve it forth.