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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 2518459" data-attributes="member: 177">Given that, I am rather skeptical some of the conclusions you report...If you're only working from English and French cookbooks, then the center would have to be either English or French.  You''d have little way of telling if the center were actually Greman, or Italian, or Spanish, because he's not using those sources. Also recall that peasants didn't write a whole heck of a lot.  Cookbooks would have been written by servants of the rich, for the rich and their servants.  That should skew the source material somewhat...Well, in the Middle Ages, there was no large middle class to speak of.  Saying only the peasants ate brown bread is rather like saying only the majority of people ate brown bread.In England and France, sure.  But look at coastlines on those countries!  What meats are available will vary from region to region.  No refigeration means little transport of perishable meats.  Germans and Swiss would have notably less access to fish, for example.  And cooking methods will probably also have varied widely from region to region.  My wife is translating a cookbook by Bartolomeo Scappi, private cook for Pope Prius V, dated 1570 (very late middle ages).  And while there's seven different words for boiling, that doesn't seem to be the first step in cooking meat most of the time.Sugar was new to Europe at the time, and it was a sign of wealth to use it.  So Scappi puts it on everything, almost literally.  Vegetables, meats, he doesn't seem to care.  It may be that a majority of Scappi's recipes say "it would be good to sprinkle this with sugar and lemon juice".  But you can expect that the common folk would not have used it nearly so much, because it was still rather expensive.</blockquote>

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