Interesting: Bread as Plate

I’m reading this eBook: Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages, and During the Renaissance Period by Paul Lacroix.

It has an interesting bit about bread. I guess this is one way to do without a plate:

“It must be stated that the custom of leavening the dough by the addition of a ferment was not universally adopted amongst the ancients. For this reason, as the dough without leaven could only produce a heavy and indigestible bread, they were careful, in order to secure their loaves being thoroughly cooked, to make them very thin. These loaves served as plates for cutting up the other food upon, and when they thus became saturated with the sauce and gravy they were eaten as cakes.”

Other interesting bits about food:

“…peas passed as a royal dish in the sixteenth century, when the custom was to eat them with salt pork.”

In reading some of Michael Pollan’s books (just finished In Defense of Food) it inspired me to try and figure out what people used to eat back in the day. Peas and salt pork. Go figure. Simple, but probably really delicious. I think pork enhances anything “green.” Ha.

“In the time of Bruyérin Champier, physician to Henry II., raspberries were still completely wild; the same author states that wood strawberries had only just at that time been introduced into gardens, ‘by which,’ he says, ‘they had attained a larger size, though they at the same time lost their quality.’ “

Sounds like modern agriculture, actually… sacrificing quality for quantity.

“Although the consumption of butchers’ meat was not so great in the Middle Ages as it is now, the trade of a butcher, to which extraordinary privileges were attached, was nevertheless one of the industries which realised the greatest profits.”

Not so much today… cheap meat and those working at the slaughterhouse are not held too high in our society, no?