Much coolness happened this weekend. 

I was contacted by the Zwei Fat Chicks, Canadian Podcast Divas. Their most recent podcast is primarily a review of The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. As part of their discussion about the idea of the 100 mile diet, they feature medievalcooking.org.

If you are not listening to the Zwei Fat Chicks, you should. They are delightful to listen to and I recommend them very highly. Click on the link above to hear them at Pod Bean, or subscribe to them at iTunes. If you subscribe at iTunes, please consider rating the podcast and writing a review.

I also spent a good portion of the weekend doing chicken research, specifically about the breed that I own. The big generality is that the Polish date to pre-1601 and that the breed is so old that its origins are obscured. There is also a lot of conflicting information about where the crested breeds come from and while the common wisdom is that there really were no such things as breeds until the 17th century, I am finding that there were common names for shared characteristics in animals prior to the 17th century. The gene pools would have been regional, rather than there being a standard that existed in different places and times.

According to The Field Guide to Chickens, the Polish are also called “Crested Fowl, Crested Dutch, Polands, Poland Fowls, Paduan, Padoue, and Patavinian.” and were cataloged and illustrated by the Italian naturalist, Ulisse Aldrovandi. Aldrovandi maintains that the breed originated in Padua, but there is also evidence that the breed was imported from the Near East.

The particular variant that I have at my house are the White Crested Black Polish and were standardized in 1938 (again, according to “The Field Guide to Chickens”). This does not mean that the color variation didn’t exist prior to 1938, but that it was a recognized standard in that year. I need to find illustrations of Polish chickens to get an idea of what they would have looked like during the middle ages, most specifically in 1593 in Bruges.

The more daunting part of this little research project of mine is trying to find out how chickens would have been kept. There are some great resources for feeding chickens (including in Digby) and I want to do a reasonable analysis of the real content of the feed and how it differs from the modern high-protein diet that is typically recommended, if it varies at all.

There has been some great advice given to me and I am so happy to have people in my life that understand my insanity.

One of the best pieces of information I got was that if you have access to a University or large library with a large microfilm catalog do a key word search on “pre-1700″ (or whatever their cut off is for the early stuff) and “husbandry” or “animal” or “poultry” you should find a number of resources.

There is also the Catalog of Rare Veterinary Books and Allied Subjects in Animal Husbandry (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/vetmed/html/foreword.html) is a fantastic resource not only for those studying animals during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but for those studying later time periods as well.

There will be more updates as I continue forward with this project. It’s a huge undertaking while I have two huge undertakings going on (including the full data entry and analysis of the Dutch cookbooks) because I am apparently unable to just engage in some light, floofy research project.

h/t to THL Femke de Roas, Maitress Anne-Marie d’Ailleurs, and Abot Master Johann von Metten.

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