sca-cooks Creativity

[Stephen Bloch]

Linneah wrote:
>It seems that everytime someone offers documentation for a recipe(receipt) 
>that they have taken one written in period and "done their best with it". Does 
>this mean that a cook shouldn't create their own recipies and call them "period" 
>because they are based on ingredients and techniques that would have been 
>used in period?  I have come up with a wonderful spiced and fruited ground 
>prok dish that I would love to serve as well as having others in mind waiting
>to burst forth.

I certainly wouldn't absolutely rule out such a thing.  But in my (rare)
moments of humility, I recognize that I don't have a perfect knowledge
of "ingredients and techniques that would have been used in period."
So I would prefer to stick to recipes that ACTUALLY come from the Middle
Ages, rather than those that I THINK COULD have come from the Middle
Ages.

For example, suppose I want to build a sotelty of a castle in the
clouds.  I do some folklore research, and find period tales involving
castles in the clouds (I don't actually know that; it's a made-up
example), so the subject is period.  I know how to build a castle from
tough pie-crust; there are ample medieval descriptions for that.  Now
how do I build the clouds?  Well, obviously, meringue: there are ample
medieval references to separating eggs, "beating" eggs by drawing them
repeatedly through a straynour, etc.  BUT... in all the medieval
recipes I've read, I've never seen "beat the eggs until they are fluffy
and form peaks" or the like.  Indeed, meringue is such a magical effect
that, given the medieval love for illusion food, I think if they'd
known about it, they would have used it extensively and left directions
on how to do it best (chill the bowl, avoid getting even the slightest
bit of yolk into the white, etc.)  Since there is no such surviving
evidence (to my knowledge), I conclude that, although they had all the
ingredients and the techniques, they just didn't discover it.

Now, back to that "wonderful spiced and fruited ground pork dish".  Is
the particular combination of spices and fruits one that was used in the
Middle Ages?  What would a medieval cook have had that resembled modern
"ground pork"?  And so on.  Linneah may have perfectly good answers to
these questions, as far as I know.  But if I start from an actual
medieval recipe, I don't need to worry about these questions at all.

						Steve / Joshua