To continue the aside, one must remember that monastic traditions vary widely in their practices--even within Catholicism. There is no "monastic diet." There are hundreds! What monks ate varied depending on order as well as location...with preferences often trumped by necessity. While most orders, following the precedents set by the Benedictines, eschewed the consumption of flesh, actual practice was more often dictated by a sustainable waste-not policy.
While meat consumption of some sort or another was therefore hard to avoid under certain circumstances, imagining a monk hunkering down over a leg of lamb or a hearty beef stew is a sore misrepresentation in almost all cases. Cattle were more profitable alive as milk and fiber producers and as bond animals. Dead cattle could also be put to many more profitable uses than food. Parchment, vellum, tallow, and oil were more valuable, and meat could be sold for a net gain. Since profit was important and asceticism a nearly universal factor, the monks themselves went without the choice portions. Most major orders' recipe traditions are still with us and contain very little in the way of meat...usually just fat, bone stock, or token amounts of cured flesh.
It is not, however, inaccurate to imagine Medieval monks getting damn close to shit-faced every day. Almost everything is fermentable, and monasteries have a long history of brewing. It is possible to look at many illuminated manuscripts and trace the course of the day in the monk's calligraphy...from error-free with perfect form in the morning to rife with corrections done with a shaky hand by afternoon. This is largely thought to be due to afternoon drunkenness.
Speaking of monastic recipe books (and back on topic
), I picture HCJ eating pretty much what I do in real life, and I imagine it as being the result or primarily Ni-Kunni and secondarily Gallente influence. I picture Ni-Kunni cuisine being monastically utilitarian because it was necessary for them to sustain strong, healthy humans with a minimum amount of available ingredients on their original world. In short, I imagine
this as a Ni-Kunni cookbook. HCJ's time among the Gallente, though, got him used to some stronger flavors. So while he still prefers the simple, plain, easily-digestible food of his childhood, he likes it with a bit of extra spice (IRL, that cookbook is amazingly awesome...just double up on the spices
).
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Topic: Racial Cuisine? (Read 5399 times)