[ck] sca-cooks Creativity

[LYN M PARKINSON]

Linneah,

Of course you can create your own recipes.  (And I'll bet more than just
me would like to see your pork recipe; minced pork recipes are in Two
Fifteenth Century Cookbooks, for example.).  I like to do redactions of
period receipts but doing my own is a second kind of fun.  When I'm
planning a menu, I read through a book or two of that period to get
myself in the right mind frame, then let the imagination go.  Once I've
got what I want, I may go back to the books to double check on
combinations, or presentations, or whatever.  Sometimes, given local food
prices and availability, you can't find exactly what you want to balance
the look/budget/taste of your meal and you have to invent.

Go to it.  And share--  ;-)



Well, before I sent this, I finished reading more of the posts.  What I
create I do not attempt to pass off as 'absolutely, incontrovertably
authentic'.  Sometimes, later, I find that there is a thing in a period
cookbook.  For a roast chicken, I made a plum sauce and called it
pflaummenmus.  Several years later, found the recipe.  Very close.  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.



Allison