SC - Re: sca-cooks Creativity

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Linneah writes:

>I would like to pose another question.  I believe that someone mentioned the 
>ability to "taste" a recipe.  I am not a professional cook, but I have a lot of 
>experience.  I can read a recipe and have an idea of how it would taste.  I can 
>imagine what changes it would make to the taste if I were to change an 
>ingredient or two.  I know that I (personnally) would not like the taste of 
>pepper in my milk, for example.

Before I touch the main point: what makes you object to combining pepper
and milk?  Modern cream soups do it constantly!  This is an assumption,
and a false one, about how the flavors would interact.  If you haven't
actually tried it, you don't know what will happen.  No matter how good
your palate.  Which leads me to my first main point.

I have trouble with the notion of "tasting" a medieval recipe by reading it
for several reasons.  The first is that combinations sometimes have effects
that are not predictable unless you've eaten that particular combination
before (sometimes for chemical reasons).  Medieval cuisine involves *many*
combinations unfamiliar to modern cooks; that's part of what makes it 
interesting.  For that matter, it involves substances unfamiliar to modern
cooks.  I simply do not believe that someone without a fair amount of
experience -- ideally extending into years -- with a particular combination
of particular substances can "taste" it on reading.  The ability to "taste"
modern recipes in known idioms is particularly misleading in this regard;
we don't *notice* the effects of familiarity with the idiom.

The second is that I have eaten dishes that followed the same period recipe
pretty close to religiously, to the extent that that is possible, and came
out tasting *very* different, because of details in the ingredients used
(many recipes just call for "wine"; the sort you use *matters* to the taste),
details of the preparation not included in the recipe, and most obviously,
the proportions used.  If you read a recipe and "get a sense of how it
tastes", you're almost certainly making unconscious assumptions about all that
stuff, and not coming even close to the range of actual dishes that can
be made from that one recipe.

If you read six recipes for the same dish -- and six is a conservative number
for how many recipes from the same general geographic area may be available
for a reasonably popular medieval dish -- you may get closer to understanding
what the parameters of the medieval dish were (that is, to what made something
a blanc manger, or a blanc desire, or a whatever, to a medieval diner).  But
as a single example, I recently spent several weeks working with a professional
on a paper for the Oxford Food Symposium trying to establish just what the
heck makes something a galentine -- and galentine is the most common sauce
in the English corpus, with over forty extant English recipes.  Those recipes
have *zero* ingredients in common -- yet an English cook following recipes
was expected to know what should be in a particular galentine for a particular
use well enough that several recipes include galentine sauce *as an 
ingredient*, with no specification (or little) as to what to put in it.

The author of that paper has been both cooking and studying English cuisine
from that period at a level few of us dream of for decades, and *she* doesn't
think she can just look at a recipe and tell what it should be like.  There's
a *lot* of complexity here.

>I believe that a person who has had the benefit of eating several period feasts 
>(those actually redacted from period sources) and read many of the sources can 
>imagine what the general taste of a recipe would be.  It would then be possible 
>to combine different ingredients to create the same sort of taste.  

Speaking for myself, I've not only eaten them, I've designed them.  And I'm
*very* cautious about saying I could do that.  Further: how is someone to get
that experience?  *Very* few of our feasts are actually composed entirely of
dishes prepared without significant deviation from medieval sources.  Fewer
yet give the diner any indication which dishes are, and which are not.  I've
seen a *lot* of cooks learning and copying what I think of as generic SCA
cuisine from feast to feast.  I've seen immensely less of learning what
any medieval cuisine is like from anything we do.

>If I know that 
>cinnamon, mace, and raisins were sometimes used to flavor pork in a certain 
>dish, could I not then create a dish "in the Medieval style" by using the same 
>ingredients in a new way?

Perhaps; but what do you mean by "in a new way"?  If you use the same
ingredients in the same combinations with the same general preparation methods,
you've probably just followed the medieval recipe.  If you haven't -- how
do you know that the changes you've made do not, themselves, embody modern
assumptions about how dishes should be structured, that violate medieval
ones?

>I am over simplifying.  But just as I don't want to go to a restaurant and eat the 
>very same dish that I read about in my cookbook, I would like to partake of the
>cook's own dishes "in the Medieval style" at a feast.  I am not saying that the
>entire feast should be "new".  A little creativity goes a long way.

But medieval recipes aren't like modern ones.  Dozens of different modern 
recipes can be made from the same medieval recipe, just by varying proportions
and preparation times and techniques; at a modern restaurant, we would 
consider exactly those changes as making this version of the dish unique.

Further, there are literally thousands of extant period recipes.  We have
a *very* long way to go, before we reach the point where we have to invent
new dishes in order to avoid a feast consisting entirely of familiar fare.

Following a medieval recipe (or, more precisely, developing a specific dish
from one) *requires* creativity -- far more creativity, in many cases, than 
inventing a dish that consists of variants of familiar combinations cooked 
familiarly.  And in my experience, the results are usually more distinctive
and stunning.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry