[MR] Atlantia Digest, Vol 75, Issue 14

[Alex Long]

to add, putting cloves in an apple or an orange smells nice & looks pretty. I went to an event many years ago where a lady was making them, bedecking them in ribbons for hanging, and they were very beautiful. When I asked if she was familiar with the custom of passing the fruit around, she was not (I dutifully schooled her so that she would not be led astray by some wayward lad). She had a look on her face that doubted my tale, but I'm sure that at some point she would have been approached...after all, she had all that bait laid out! lol

-- Ceara ní Néill 

--- On Wed, 4/8/09, Catherine Clark <clothier16c at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Catherine Clark <clothier16c at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MR] Atlantia Digest, Vol 75, Issue 14
To: atlantia at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2009, 7:08 AM


>From quietly standing in the shadows:

 

Where and when the "cloven fruit idea" stared in the SCA is up for guessing. From the historical angle please consider the following:

 

Cloves, indeed all the spices, were extremely valuable. Whole cloves even more so, even up into the 18th c. An apple or orange (depending on the country) stuffed with cloves was a simple, and valuable, pomander. Offering a single clove to a guest at a banquet was a way of displaying wealth and courtesy. Putting the cloves into a fruit was a simple and effective way of passing them around. As to the kissing, has everyone forgotten that the "kiss of greeting" was common? I agree that it is not, to our way of thinking, a healthy custom. But it was the custom then. 

 

Even Louis XIV chewed cloves as an offset to aging (rotting) teeth.

 


 
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