sca-cooks Creativity

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine Rountre here.

Lord Ras writes:

>Any creation useing period food, techniques, spicery, etc. is period. Period!
>:-)
>Period cooks combined period foods, spicery, techniques every day wihtout the
>benefit for the most part of a "cookbook". I feel that to restrict "period"
>to recipes from existing period cookbooks would be on the same caliber as
>saying a modern cook was not createing modern food if they didn't use a
>recipe from Betty Crocker.

Before I start: the most I ask of anyone else's feast is that there be
enough edible food that I don't go away hungry, and that nothing is claimed
to be anything it isn't.  That being said....

There are a lot of problems with this approach to defining period cuisine.
The most obvious is that different people in different times and places 
combine foods differently, even if they start with the same available
foodstuffs.  For a single example, consider the recent discussion of what
to replace potatoes with in beef stews.

There are surviving recipes for beef stew.  None that I am aware of calls
for any vegetable except onions.  In fact, I'm not familiar with any 
non-Islamic medieval European recipe that looks like a modern stew (as
opposed to a soup) that significantly combines meat (not just broth) 
and vegetables.  The evidence is that they didn't _do_ that.

Certainly, not every cook prepared meals from cook books -- though there
is good reason, based not only on the number of surviving collections
that duplicate specific recipes, but on how widely dispersed those
manuscripts are in terms of geographic origin -- to believe that cookery
collections circulated far more among upper class households, even 
prior to the widespread introduction of printing, than most people
today dream.  Still, we have many surviving collections with hundreds
of recipes.  If, among them all, we don't see _any_ exemplars of
combinations of certain kinds of ingredients in certain kinds of dishes,
that's good reason to doubt that such combinations were ever routine.

Second, medieval cookery bore strong regional influences.  The more
seriously one studies the record, the more cautiously one tends to 
approach the phrase "medieval style dish".  Is that medieval English
style, or northern French, or southern French, or ...?  Having any
very strong sense of what any of that means, requires extensive
experience with the surviving evidence on what people ate, not just
"in period", but where and when.

An interesting sidelight: the serious researchers in this field (the
ones you might think of as the pros) tend to cut off the medieval
European time-period, for cookery, at roughly the end of the 15th
century -- and the reason has nothing to do with the Age of Discovery,
at least not directly.  They do that, because the style of the 
cuisine changed distinctly in the 16th century, not in terms of
ingredients, but in terms of what cooks did with them.

Modern cooks who are not *deeply* steeped in the traditions of medieval
cookery, when they go to invent "medieval style" dishes, must bring
some habits, instincts, and presuppositions to the task.  Given that
(by hypothesis) these people have not studied the medieval tradition
closely enough to have strong ones (even at the conscious level,
let alone at the reflex level), the havits, instincts, and presuppositions
they bring to bear will be modern.  And the result is -- modern stews,
with something substituted for the potatoes.

Medievals were not trying to make modern stews in an ingredient-impoverished
environment.  They were trying to make medieval dishes, in a normal one.
It shouldn't be surprising that the results they came up with were
different.

I have nothing under the sun against people making good, edible stews
and serving them at events. It's a huge service.  And I think it, in
general, a good thing if they avoid practices that scream "modern" 
even to untutored minds and palates, and provide food that doesn't
remind one of the local diner.  But it does bother me when such food
is billed as "period", and such meals are presented as medieval meals.
They almost never are.  And whether or not it is the cook's job to
provide a history lesson with every meal, it is at least not our job
to provide a *false* one.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry