sca-cooks A Verbose Bunch of People

[Aonghas MacLeoid (B.G. Morris)]

Allison wrote:
> Cooks
> cooked with what they had, not according to rare books.  Do I have to
> know the entire trading history of cassia to put some in the chicken pie?
>  I don't think so.  I still might research it but Lady Allison in period
> would not have known every step; she still had to order the cook and see
> her hall fed.

I agree that most medieval cooks did not do their cooking from
cookbooks.  But they had something equally valuable that we lack: they
had lived all their lives in the Middle Ages.  Some things that we take
for granted wouldn't have occurred to them, and vice versa.  The kinds
of improvisations you or I make in the kitchen are not necessarily the
same kinds of improvisations le Menagier's wife would have made,
because we have such massively different cultural backgrounds.

Let me use an analogy from music.  If you make up a song, or improvise
on an existing song, I can predict certain things about it simply
because you were raised in 20th-century Western pop culture.  It's most
likely in 4/4 time, it probably starts in a particular major or minor
key, modulates to the major key built on the 5th of that key (with
perhaps a visit to the 2nd or 4th first), and returns to the starting
key at the end with one of several standard cadential closings
(depending on whether you have more of a rock, jazz, classical, folk,
etc. background).  It will probably consist of a repeated chorus with
verses in between, possibly a contrasting bridge in the middle,
possibly a modulation up a step in the middle, etc.  Any ornaments you
add will probably be either trills, mordents, or major/minor arpeggii.
It would probably utterly foreign to anybody living in the 14th, not to
mention 12th, century.  This is why so many SCA-written songs sound
more like Joan Baez or Steeleye Span than like any known medieval
music.

The fact is, people not raised in the Middle Ages (even those who have
studied it somewhat) do a lousy job of making up medieval music, and I
don't see why cookery should be any different.  Yes, there are people
so thoroughly steeped in their study of medieval music or cookery that
they can do a decent imitation thereof.  But most of us are not that
good.

I sha'n't criticize anyone for making up dishes by combining the
medieval ingredients and techniques they know about -- I've done that
many a time myself, in order to have something interesting on the table
at dinnertime.  But if I'm trying to learn about medieval cooking, not
to mention demonstrate it to other people, I think it works a lot
better to start with a specific medieval recipe.  It's not as though
we've used them all up and NEED something new....

						Steve / Joshua