sca-cooks Transport of Foodstuffs

[Stephen Bloch]

Eogan wrote:

> I never was asking about including modern dishes - I'm not "childish"
> (as another poster insinuated) with my food tastes - I dove into my
> first turnip/parsnip dish last night and loved it. I was asking about
> the historical problem of 1) when did "new world" foods, including corn,
> chocolate, and squashes get over to Europe, and 2) how were they
> accepted into the diets of different members of Europe and its castes?

A legitimate question, although unless you're planning a 16th-17th-century
feast, the question is moot.  As we all know, a FEW Europeans got to the
New World at the end of the 15th century, and brought back a FEW samples
of local crops.  Tobacco seems to have caught on relatively quickly
(less than a hundred years).  Turkeys were at least known, if not common
dinner fare, by the late 16th century: there's a statue of St. Francis
of Assisi of that date with a turkey among the other animals at his
feet.  I don't remember the date and location of the statue; I just
remember reading about it on rec.food.historic.  Potatoes, as another
poster wrote, were accepted slowly, originally as peasant food or a last
resort in case of famine.  Peanuts were apparently brought back by the
Portuguese, who then introduced them to their colonies in sub-Saharan
Africa, which adopted them into the local cuisine sufficiently that
English explorers 200 years later found them as a common ingredient in
"native" cuisine.
 
Several years ago there was one of those perennial debates on the Rialto
about "when should the SCA's period cut off?"  I and others pointed out
that each field of human endeavour had some dramatic event or period of
dramatic change that could legitimately mark "the end of the Middle Ages":
in Western Church history, 1516 (?); in Eastern Church history, 1453; in
Iberian history, 1492; in painting, maybe c. 1450; in music, maybe c.
1450; in dance, early 15th c. (i.e. just BEFORE the earliest surviving
dance treatises, which seem Renaissance in their outlook) and in cooking,
1492.  In other words, even though SCA period technically runs for over a
century after 1492, I consider that century an aberration, and have no
particular interest in designing a feast set in that time.

> One thing I do disagree on is corn - recent research has turned up
> references to it in 13 and 14th century Chinese and Indian texts about
> the medicinal and nutritional values of different plants and animals -
> that's certainly not enough to include corn tortillas at a Saxon feast,
> but it was around in some places besides the Americas.

I find that extremely surprising.  One thing to watch out for (I don't
know whether Eogan is guilty of this) is that in the English of the
British Isles (as opposed to the U.S.) "corn" means "grain", not maize
or Indian corn in particular.  The English were raising, and cooking
with, corn for centuries before they ever saw an ear of maize.

It is, of course, possible that maize came across the Pacific in
outrigger canoes hundreds or thousands of years ago (there have long
been theories of continued contact after the Bering land bridge went
under); I'd very much like to see this "recent research".

> ... I do believe a
> balance must be struck between plausible medieval dishes, that is,
> dishes of quasi-medieval nature prepared in a medieval way, and those
> that are truely authentic that everyone at a feast will turn their nose
> up at. Educating 150 feasters would be wonderful, but I'd also like to
> feed them.

None of us wants to feed 150 feasters something that they won't eat.
We differ on how to avoid that.  I take it for granted that medieval
food IS edible and tasty (or they wouldn't have eaten it for so long),
and conclude that if what I made by following the recipe isn't edible
and tasty, I must have misinterpreted the recipe.  I would prefer not
to modernize the recipe, but to look for other plausible inter-
pretations, and if I can't find one that works, just don't serve that
dish.  We have no shortage of medieval recipes to try.

						Steve / Joshua