Everyone’s familiar with the Luttrell Psalter, right? Er, um, I have to admit here that I was on passing terms with it – when mentioned in context I thought ‘oh, right, medieval manuscript’ but didn’t know any more.
Well, these folks are learning it very well – they’re re-enacting it, and filming their efforts. It’s very nice, because you learn so much when you try things. Like in the milking the sheep (milk sheep?) film, was there a first draft of the wattle sheep corral that wasn’t high enough, as implied by the jumping sheep at the end? It’s easy to make academic mistakes if you don’t try to actually do the activity. The picture in the Psalter of milking the sheep seems to show a fairly high corral piece, but then again, perspective in these drawings is frequently unrealistic, so maybe not. Only by testing against sheep would you know.
I wonder what sheep milk is like. Do you suppose you risk tuberculosis like cows?
And yes, now I understand that the Luttrell Psalter is a terrific resource for Peasant Tech. You can find the whole thing online in high-res here. Broadband/dial-up.
I know a bit about milk and the middle ages 🙂 Milk was rarely a drink in the middle ages. Remember, lack of refrigeration results in a product that goes sour quicker than other beverages. Other animal milks were generally not consumed by adults and only on the rare case where a mother died in childbirth and no wetnurse could be obtained did babies drink other species’ milks. It answers a lot of questions as to why we have several generations of people who are suddenly lactose intolerant. Their bodies are saturated with cow’s milk (generally) as babies due to the overwhelming use of infant milk based formulas rather than breastfeeding. That is a lot of cow’s milk protein to ingest in such a short period of time. It takes a species around 500 years to fully accept a drastic change in diet (this is another reason we have lots of Americans who allergic to corn and peanuts as these are New World foods and we mostly have European backgrounds)
What sheep milk was primarily used for was butter and cheese. I come across milk as an ingredient rarely in period cooking recipes. Cheese and butter, yes, but rarely milk. I find more instances of almond milk than cow/sheep/goat milk. (This is where you ask, “How do you milk an almond?” to which I respond, “First you get a very small stool…..”)
Yes, but can you get TB from cheese? Is cheesemaking a way to protect oneself from TB, as it is a way to pre-digest the lactose that most of us ought to grow out of digesting?
Sweet Grass Dairy are great cheesemakers (cow and goat) just over the border in Georgia. They said that they are required by Federal law to pasturize their milk for their fresh cheeses, but can used unpasturized if the cheese will be aged a certain amount of time (I can’t remember how long). So apparently the pathogens die out after awhile.
Or you can know the animal being milked and have it TB tested.