A chicken is good all year round. Seasonality of meat consumption in Renaissance cookbooks

Seasonality studies have a long tradition especially for the Paleolithic and Mesolithic; the aim in these periods is, among the other things, to investigate hunter-gatherer mobility within a territory. When populations started to become sedentary and to breed animals, the meat of domestic animals became, in theory, available all year round, in contrast to plants that necessarily continued to follow seasonal cycles; therefore, investigations focusing on the season of death of the animals are usually lacking in the studies on later prehistoric periods or historical contexts.However, the reading of Renaissance cookbooks evidences that the season when it was preferable to consume the meat of different domestic and wild animals was still considered as very important in that period. The selection was based not only on taxonomy, but, within the same species, the age and sex of the individuals was taken into account. The seasonal choice was related to both practical and cultural-religious reasons. From a methodological point of view these Renaissance indications suggest that it would be useful to investigate the seasonal exploitation of animal resources in more recent contexts and interpret archaeozoological data also using this additional source of information

Breed · Consumption (sociology · Prehistory · Seasonality · Selection (genetic algorithm · The Renaissance · Animal Diversity and Health Studies · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies