sca-cooks Re: sca cooks Creativity

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Derdriu quoted me responding to Lord Ras:

>>>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.
>> 
><snip>
> 
>> 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.
>> 
>
>Check out Markham.  He gives all kinds of recipes for "pottages" which are
>simply soups.  In fact, I redacted a recipe for a pottage that used cabbage,
>onions, and barley.

Of course.  There are many earlier recipes for pottages, broths, and brewets.
My point was not that those didn't exist.  Rather, I was making a specific
claim about how ingredients were combined in things that looked like modern
stew.  (For that matter, few of the pottages, broths, and brewets combine
vegetables and meat either.  Those that involve vegetables usually do not
involve meat other than meat broth or marrow, though I can think offhand of one
exception, that includes small meat balls.)

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry