Sunday, May 15, 2011

Ancient meals

We have a few cookbooks detailing medieval recipes. The authors reconstructed the dishes as best they could from the old manuals; trying to figure out what "well mixed" might mean in this context or what in the foggy blue morning some untranslated ingredient name could be. There are some Roman recipes around, though they also suffer from the same weights-and-measures/ingredient-name problems.

We have some notion of what the entertainment was at the king's banquets, but not so much on how the less money-heavy dined. Such is history, I suppose; nobody generally thinks to record what a family reunion dinner is like: though we do have Bruegel for a wedding. It's only 500 years old, but is probably close enough to stand for the previous few centuries.

One little missing detail that makes a huge difference in how everybody felt the next morning is "How was the cleanup done?"

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