SC - SC- Lists of Foods

[david friedman]

At 11:39 AM -0400 4/23/97, Michael Macchione wrote:

>What I was wondering was, if anyone knows of a source that would basically
>say which foods (ingredients not recipes) were eaten when and where.  Thus
>if I asked to make up a feast for a French meal in the 1400's.  I could
>start here to see what kind of dishes I'm talking about.  Or, if a novice
>is looking for "one more dish" to round out a meal, they could be sure to
>include something that is at least available to the area, even if they
>can't document the recipe itself.
>
>I guess, one of my greatest fears, is to serve a themed meal and have
>someone come over to me after the feast and say "That was a great meal,
>but they did you know that they didn't eat such-n-such in that period"

So does anyone know of any such list, or does anyone else think that this
kind of list would be a good thing to build up?

1. I don't know of such a list and I doubt it exists. There are lists,
including one of my pieces, of what foods are late period or out of period
and when they came into use, but I don't know of anything nearly as
complete as you describe.

2. I am not sure I see much point to your "if a novice ..." idea. Making a
great effort to cook a feast with ingredients used at a particular time and
place when you don't have the corresponding recipes seems like straining at
a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Imagine an ordinary American cook turned loose in a Chinese grocery store
to buy ingredients for dinner; what he or she would end up producing would
be much more like modern American food than like Chinese food. Now imagine
a Chinese cook turned loose in your local supermarket to buy ingredients
for dinner--the result would be a Chinese meal. Ingredients are not
irrelevant--a potato or tomato in what is supposed to be a medieval meal is
a bit jarring. But getting exactly the right ingredients is less important,
if your objective is to produce the sort of food they ate, than knowing
what they did with them.

On the other hand, if you have recipes from 14th century England are doing
a Yorkshire feast, it would be nice to know what they ate in Yorkshire. But
I suspect that a complete compilation of such information is past hoping
for.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/