SC - Re: sca-cooks Creativity

[Stephen Bloch]

Wow! I just caught up on 500 messages on this list, and think I'm ready
to reply to a few of them.

Linneah wrote:
>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.  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?

I know that Katerine has already replied to this, and was surprised that
she didn't jump on what I'm about to jump on.  To wit, "the Medieval
style".  We're talking about a period of a thousand years and an area a
thousand miles square, which for most of that time had such lousy
communication and transportation that towns a hundred miles apart
could have completely different cultures.  A person who has eaten
"several period feasts", even done by the strictest authenticity mavens
and the most talented cooks in the SCA, may have had one 13th-century
Arabo-Andalusian feast, one 14th-century Parisian, one 15th-century German,
and one 16th-century Napolitan.  I don't think one can glean much of a
"Medieval style" from those samples.


>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.

Here I'll echo what (I think) Katerine said: even if you follow a medieval
recipe as exactly as you can, it still takes a lot of creativity to fill
in the gaps.  Thus if you hand the same medieval recipe to a dozen
(competent, experienced) SCA cooks, you'll get a dozen different dishes
back.  Furthermore, we have THOUSANDS of medieval recipes that nobody's
even tried to redact yet.  In short, there's no danger of monotony from
sticking to medieval recipes.

Which doesn't mean anybody HAS to stick to medieval recipes.  There may
be other good reasons not to; I simply believe that the argument against
it in the above-quoted paragraph doesn't hold water.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University