Interestingly, this reminds me of a book I read awhile back about Enlightenment cooking - before then, the standard European upper-class diet ran heavily to Large Pieces Of Meat, but the pendulum swung the other way and the meat/fish became totally unrecognizable under the sauces and preparation.
You might want to up that figure of 1000 years a bit - back in 1005 they were doing fairly well for food on the whole, at least in Europe. The documentation's sparse, but archaeological evidence shows us a lot of variety, and reenactors take full advantage of this.
One of the biggest indicators, as I recall from my archaeology course, is that non-meat-focused diets tend to be a lot more varied than the mostly carnivorous ones. Possibly that's because if you have a dead elk, you really need to eat most of it quick before it goes off.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2005-09-08 02:53 am (UTC)You might want to up that figure of 1000 years a bit - back in 1005 they were doing fairly well for food on the whole, at least in Europe. The documentation's sparse, but archaeological evidence shows us a lot of variety, and reenactors take full advantage of this.
One of the biggest indicators, as I recall from my archaeology course, is that non-meat-focused diets tend to be a lot more varied than the mostly carnivorous ones. Possibly that's because if you have a dead elk, you really need to eat most of it quick before it goes off.