SC - Re: sca-cooks Re: Spice Use and Food Poisoning, etc.

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Charissa writes:

>This is one of my favorite arguments.  Food certainly has followed
>trends, especially since cetain ingredients have only been available to
>certain cultures at cetain times.  But, it doesn't follow the strict
>fashion rules of, say, clothing.  I think it's very safe to extrapolate
>that medeival cooks, like modern, would look at the set of potential
>ingredients available to them in a kitchen, and at the tools they have
>to manipulate those ingredients, and use them in whatever seemed to be a
>reasonable combination.  They may have sometimes used actual written
>recipes, but more often they likely used approximate recipes that they
>knew, or improvised on a written idea, or improvised according to the
>kinds of things they were used to making or eating- just like cooks of
>any other era.  So, to look at a medeival recipe, and improvise on it
>seems perfectly resonable to me, so long as the improvisation involves
>ingrediants and tools that are appropriate for that culture and period. 
>Or, to take a set of period ingrediants and tools (well, perhaps
>substituting an electric stove for a cookfire, but not using a food
>processer or electric mixer, etc.)  and figure out something to do with
>them would certainly be period.  
>
>Keep in mind, people were not likely to have exactly what they needed to
>make specifically what someone wrote down for them on hand at all times-
>they had no supermarkets.  Additionally, they had no chest freezers to
>store the ingredients that they had in abundance in any given season. 
>Instead, they would make a meal- whether a pot of stew for a family, or
>a feast for a celebration- using what they had on hand in some
>reasonable combination or arrangement.

One hears this argument a lot in the SCA, but I don't think it holds water
for the kinds of meals that most of our events reproduce.  In particular,
it's an extrapolation from what middle and lower class modern households
do, in making dinner for anywhere up to twelve.  Now, that's a decent 
model for peasants and middle class families, but upper class kitchens
were a *very* different kind of beast.  They fed anywhere from fifty or
so people a day, to hundreds.  The cooks who headed them were professionals
who had been working kitchens of that kind from their youth.  Provisioning
was a *serious* concern, not a matter of dropping by the local supermarket
and picking up what looks good.  It takes a great deal of expertise and
planning to feed people in those numbers all the food they ever eat, and
see that nobody ever goes hungry.

A *far* better model would be a large and high-class restaurant.

As to cookbook availability: there is evidence that recipes were far
more widely disseminated than most people in the SCA dream.  As a single
example: there is one recipe for stewed chicken (not at all what most
people think of -- a whole chicken, stuffed with herbs, steamed in
a pot in the oven over wine, then served with a wine syrup) that 
occurs virtually verbatim in MS Harley 4016 (the second collection in
Austin), MS Beinecke 163 (_An Ordinance of Pottage_), Noble Boke of
Cookry, and MS Pepys 1047 (_Stere Hit Well_).  The collections that
survive typically do so in more than one MS, and typically contain
recipes taken from earlier surviving manuscripts (not just the same
name, but the same wording, often with minor variations).  The
four major manuscripts that I have located as localized in the 
Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English come from Essex, Cheshire,
Hertfordshire, and the northern midlands -- and share elements.

None of this is to say that cooks didn't deviate from recipes.  On
the contrary, small variations are common (and some are systematic
by collection: the author of MS Arundel 334, for instance, borrowed
a lot of material, including from Forme of Cury, but added coloring
agents to a huge amount of it).  But the evidence is that cookbooks
circulated all over Britain, and that they copied one from another.
It is inconceivable that this would be so, if nobody were *using*
the wretched things.

As to how to vary recipes: again, I think we are best served by
studying how *they* did, and not by following our pre-existing
(modern) impulses.  The ways that medievals varied dishes are
not necessarily the ways that occur to moderns.  And the ways
that professional cooks did it are not necessarily the ways
that middle class housewives did, either.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry