OK, this one is actually about ironwork rather than cheese.

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73103#respond

I always like how historic tools are pretty much the same as the ones we use today.  Form follows function.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

It's shorter and more to the point too. I'm still wading through the Cheese article and still don't have any idea what Whottle means.

Frosty The Lucky.

Sorry, I'm late to the party. "Whotte" is an archaic spelling of hot. He's mistranslating Galen - "calidam et acrem qualitatem" is closer to acrid (i.e. bitter) and fiery, not sour and hot, but it has a connotation of fiery in the sense of having an angry personality. I think Galen's referring to the elemental qualities of whey and its ability to influence the humors in a medicinal capacity, but I don't know. Haven't looked at Galen in a long time and although I know he talked about foods influencing your health, I didn't remember him talking about the intrinsic properties of whey.

I'd have to skim back to see if Whotte and Whottle are interchangeable. About 2/3 way through I was getting used to the various terms and starting to recognize different authors. So many of them didn't actually add anything but questionable anecdotal opinion. Different times and places, it's what makes reading this stuff enjoyable.

I was intrigued by the medicinal advice(?) regarding what kind of cheese to eat when and for treating certain ailments. Much was head shakingly off but some made perfect sense.

"Meate" = meal, yes? That fits much better than if it meant "eat". "I commend soft cheese for noon meate.' to paraphrase.

Frosty The Lucky.

1580s, so between late Middle English or early modern...yah, usually. It's used interchangeably at times, but was also being used for foods other than what we think of as meat, such as the flesh of a fruit. Or as in antiquity, for innuendo. English was doing some weird things transitionally. Shakespeare is a little earlier than King James, but mostly uses much more modern language. Picked up a great book awhile back on Old English called Wordhord, worth a rabbit hole or two.

It's still pretty interchangeable, Meet me at the Meat market to mete this eve's meate. Ahhh, homophonic pun fun. 

Meat is the most versatile if the three, usually animal flesh but also the good parts of fruit, nuts, etc. or the subject of a discussion. It's a good word.

I like words that make people think about what I said to discern what I meant. OR as is often the case, what I THOUGHT what I said meant. I like etymology but haven't practiced lately.

Frosty The Lucky.

You didn't strike me as homophonic, I try not to judge. Or perhaps you were being sarx-astic?

Don't like to judge? How do you make decisions then, fudge and hope?

Good one! I had to look it up, thank you.

Not touching "astics".  Ewwwww!

Frosty The Lucky.

Over the years I have done a fair amount of work with medieval cookery manuscripts and there are a number of English cookery and food words that have shifted meaning over the centuries.  One example is "mess".  The common modern meaning is something that is disorderly and dirty and needs to be cleaned up.  However, the older meaning is a group of 2 or more people sharing food or drink, often from a common dish or bowl.  The translators of the King James Bible used it in this sense for the story Genesis 25 about Esau "selling his birthright for a mess of pottage" meaning selling his inheritance for a bowl of soup.  "Mess" in the shared food sense survives in military usage, e.g. "mess hall," "mess sergent," "officer's mess," "mess mates," etc..

And, yes, "meat" is pretty synonymous with "meal."

I still use "mess" in that context actually. For example "i am going to fix a mess of green beans". 

I recently read that when the Normans conquered England it had a huge impact on language. English we have cows, pigs, and sheep, in French we have beef, pork, and mutton. English has shirts and pants, French has blouses and trousers. But the Normans kind of looked down on the English language as "barbaric", for lack of a better term, and the English nobles did not want to look beneath the Normans so adopted the language and some words filtered down to the peasantry. ( i hope that is the right use of the word peasantry, i do not think i have ever used that word in my life) 

Much of military language is institutional memory going back sometimes millennia.

The only way to know what mess means is context. 'Don't make a mess eating a mess of ribs in the mess.' 

Sounding words out and context is largely how I learned to read.

Frosty The Lucky.

19 hours ago, BillyBones said:

I recently read that when the Normans conquered England it had a huge impact on language

It did, but it's even more complicated. French originally was Latin, kind of. Latin Latin was never the pure Latin we usually pretend it was and the stuff they spoke in Gaul was something more like the English you get when you go to third world countries - you can communicate, but it ain't gonna be confused with Milton. When the Romans got pre-occupied in the 5th century and the Franks started moving in, you got even more Germanic influences and words, but it was still kinda sorta Latin in the middle.

When the Angles and Jutes and whatnot start going across, successive waves start fleeing into North France, changing the language more, and eventually the Normans crash the party, bringing Scandinavian words and funny pronunciations, but it's still Latin if you squint your eyes and dim the lights. Other parts of France got other refugees, like when the caliphate invaded Iberia, and none of it was homogenous to start with. So you've got pockets of the Norse stuff, Germanic influence, Spanish, Basque and even Arabic, (they were kind of grouped in later periods by how you said yes - oc, oil, or si (like Langue d'oc).

The Normans take England and influence English with the nobility doing business between the Norman version of French, the Saxon language bleeds back in, and then it starts leaking back and forth across the Channel for hundreds of years, with lots of regional variation. It was a fairly common anecdote in England throughout the late middle ages and rennaissance to hear about someone travelling 20 or 30 miles, only to find people telling them they couldn't understand them and that they didn't speak French!

The word peasant alone is a fine example of the transition. Pagus - a rural roman district, to Pais - a country, or the country, paisent - a person that lives in the country 1300s or so, paissaunt 14th century middle English, then peasant - a poor farmer by the 15th century.

Bill Bryson had a good book or two on the subject, including English, the Mother Tongue and How it Got That Way. 

During WW2 Yorkshire men in the British Army could just about make themselves understood in NW Germany where the Angles and Jutes originated.  It also helped that Yorkshire had been part of the Danelaw.

Nobody, that is much more than the 5 minute or so read i had, i got the dumbed down version. Interesting though to say the least. 

I have found that traveling around the USA you run into different dialects of English. The best example i can think of is S. Louisiana. And even though you are speaking English you and those there will be lost on what was said. Once when i was there i needed some oil for my air tools. I got on the tool truck and asked "You got any large jugs of air tool oil?" Now, i grew up way back in a holler in KY so i have that hillbilly drawl. But i also pronounce words a bit different as well. The tool guy looked at me like i was speaking Russian. 

I like to watch a guy on youtube, Max Miller with the "Tasting History" channel. Ironically the newest video talks about language and changes, specifically the word "mess". The video is about a very tasty looking dish from Germany called "Kaiserschmarren" or Keiser's mess. He also touches on the word Kaiser coming from the Latin Caesar, in Latin the letter "C" is pronounced like a hard "K". I knew that from when i took Latin but never put it together with Kaiser. Anyway, while his history is usually pretty good he does sometimes get a thing or 2 wrong, not why i watch him anyway more interested in the cooking, here is a link if anyone would like to watch:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q01hFyG7tLM

 

Oh, the dish if wondering is basically pancakes broken up and served with sugar and fruit. Looks easy and quite tasty. 

On the upside, since network radio and TV news became nation wide American English has been heavily influenced by California / Hollywood English. If the radio public doesn't understand what the narrator says they wont know what brand, tooth paste, cereal, dog food, etc. to buy. Lots of people don't really watch TV but listen while they do other things. Standardized American English is or was the California media dialect.

Frosty The Lucky.

Yah, I kind of go full Rainman on etymology. Flapjacks seem to have been a staple of armies since time memorial - Johnny cakes in the US, and I think he did an episode on flatcakes made by the Ottomans. Probably because for the simple ones, the ingredients keep easy and you can cook it on the back of anything flat. This back and forth makes me wish we still had a chat section.

Just to lead things in a slightly different direction, one of the interesting things in medieval and renaissance recepies is how they convey time instructions to folk who do not have wrist watches or other mechanical time pieces handy.  Sometimes it is very general, such as, "cook until it be enow (enough)" but there are others which are more specific, "seeth (boil) it for the time it takes to walk a mile" or "the time it takes to say 3 pater nosters ('Our Father ...'). However, specific measurement are usually more of a 19th century cookbook thing.

Jack is a common nick name for John, flap jacks are Johnny cakes and they make a flapping sound when you turn them. Typically "cakes" are leavened by leaving the dough exposed to open air and let "ripen" rise. Unleavened breads like tortillas, and Matza are made too quickly for yeast to take hold. Archeologically yeast residues are found in the most ancient pottery and stone vessels. Interestingly the same yeast cultures are found in bread and beer residue in a given village, city, etc. 

Have you ever made beer bread? Home brew works best, the live yeast works in the dough where American, pasteurized bottled "love in a canoe" beer bread rises as a quick bread like biscuits. It works a LOT better if you don't let the beer go flat first. If you do it's just a flavoring you have to add yeast.

Now you bring it up George, I remember that many nursery rhymes were said to time things. I can't remember what "Jack and Jill went up the hill." was meant to time. I REALLY miss the old days of the internet when you could do a web search and get real info instead of layer after of layer of advertisements. <sigh>

Frosty The Lucky.

Distances are another fun one. IIRC a furlong was the distance an ox could plow with out resting. And from Rome a mile was 1,000 paces.   

My daughter uses left over lees (I think lees is the right word for wine and mead, for beer it is called something different) from brewing to make bread with. Which from what i understand was pretty common and i would guess that is the reason you find the same yeasts in bread and beer in a given place. 

Speaking of nursery rhymes i like the old fairy tales as well. Many were down right dark and nothing like the sanitized Disney versions. 

Yes, a pace being left and right or approx 6'. A single leg is a "Step." League means 1,000 paces or Milles = 1 thousand in Latin the root word for mile. The recognized nautical mile is 6,000' a Roman mile.

The lees is the cloudy residue at the bottom of a tun or unfiltered bottle of wine and is made up largely of dormant yeast. The same stuff in beer or ale is Bok. I don't drink much beer anymore but some brands were known as Bok beer and if you finished the whole bottle or didn't decant it carefully the yeasty goodness in the bottom tends to make you GASSY! Same for drinking it to the lees.

Frosty The Lucky.

Slight tangent, but I just encountered a new-to-me agricultural term: "dehaulming", which refers to the removal of stalks and leaves from potato plants to encourage the growth of stronger skins before harvest. This comes ultimatetly from the Old English "healm", which means the stem or stalk of a plant. Interestingly, the word "helm" has a similar sense, especially for bundles of straw laid together for thatching.

9 hours ago, BillyBones said:

a furlong was the distance an ox could plow with out resting

Yup. One furrow long.  If you made it a chain (or four rods) wide, you had an acre, so it was also called an acre's length. I always heard it as the amount that one guy with a team of oxen could plow in a day. Now there's ya a forging project - make a Gunter's surveyor chain. Ian Mortimer also talks about units of measurement a good bit on his Time Traveler's Guide to (insert time period here) England books.

Oh GREAT, now I'm reading about dehaulming potatoes! Of the number of hits I got in a search, seems none are native English speakers so I'm having a cheesy time deciphering potato parts. I'll have to watch the potato farms this year and see when they dehaulm and who does it when.

Thank you very VERY much John! 

Frosty The Lucky.

Converting old surveys which use old measurments to modern units and and locating them on a modern map can be a very interesting exercise.  One link = 1/100 of a chain, 1 chain = 66 feet.  So, 1 link = 7.92 inches.  Also, 1 rod (aka a perch or pole) = 5.5 yards or 16.5 feet.

And while most old surveys are oriented to True North I have seen a few that used Magnetic North which, when converting to what things are today requires a calculation of how much magnetic declination has varied since the survey was made because of the wandering of the North Magnetic Pole.  Once, when we were trying to locate some old mining claims we were having a hell of a time getting things to fit on the ground until we realized that the original surveyor had applied magnetic declination in the wrong direction and the lines were, from true North, twice the declination and in the wrong direction.  Fun times.

Electronic distance measuring and GPS locating has made surveying a lot easier and faster than in the old analog days.  I have never used a Gunter's chain but I have used a steel tape (a lot), which if you want to be as accurate as possible you use a spring scale to put tension on it so that your tension is consistent for every measurement and you can also take the temperature and allow for the coefficient of expansion of steel from a  standard temperature (72 degrees F IIRC).

Also, I have made geologic maps using a plane table and alidade which is a technique now included in the Lost Secrets of the Ancients.  One of what is now called a "hack" was that to keep a plane table steady in the Wyoming wind you fill the plane table bag with rocks and hang it from the bottom of the tripod to give it more weight and mass. 

I've come as close to cartography as I want plotting drill holes on USGS maps. In the field they used a rag tape or steel "chain" tape for greater precision. The rag tape was in 1/10ths and 1/100ths of a foot and the steel chain tape was chain scale. 

AND there I am at the drafting table with the field geologist's notebook, report and sketches trying to plot the drill holes accurately enough for the bridge designers. Some geos use the rag tape and others use the chain. Oh joy guess who gets to convert everything to the same scale?

THEN it goes to design and THEY return the finals and I got to redraw it all in ink on mylars, correct dimensions, match scale and if my drawing passes it goes to the print makers and off to the construction guys.

Thank HEAVEN I only did that for a year and a half before getting transferred to a drill crew where I could make things challenging for the draftsman.

You ain't LIVED until you've plotted field notes, measurements, angles, headings, elevations and notes on a map. . . a couple three times!

Fun times. Frosty The Lucky.