>Gardens, maybe an occasional barley plot, quite a lot of land
>used as pasture, but a far cry from a rural community.
However the skill to tend a vegetable garden is transferable to growing vegetables in a rural community. As does a tending livestock skill. I agree that a farming ability at 17 doesn't properly represent this.
>Many city-dwellers know next to nothing about food preparation. Real urban
>accomodation won't have hearths where cooking is done; instead, prepared
>food is bought from the numerous "fast food" sellers and taken along. It
>takes estate-like households in order to have your own cooking place,
>affordable maybe to thane-status craft-people/merchants or outright
>nobility.
The loss of food preparation skills is a recent (last fifty years) inovation. Prior to that everyone except the very rich prepared their own food. Sure the hearth you use for cooking is the same one you use for heating but prepared food is an occasional luxury not the routine for the majority. In very poor areas several families might even share a single hearth.
Interesting fact - the second highest cause of death among women in 19th Century England was burns from open fires.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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