SC - Re: Sauces and Humors

[Lenny Zimmermann]

On Tue, 22 Jul 97 17:06:48 EDT, Anna of Dragonsmark wrote:

[snip]
>     Given that period sauces were, for the most part, used to temper the
>humors of the food so that it might be safely eaten...should the intent in
>recreation be to reproduce the balance of the original, or to find sauces that
>might better suit the material being prepared?  An example being:...salmon is
>tempered with sauce cameline....but are there not more flavorful things than
>cinnamon to put onto salmon?

The more I read, the less inclined I am to follow strict adherence to
specific combinations of food being used solely based on balancing
humors. There are multiple reasons for this, such as you must know the
humor tendency of the person eating the food, for example, to
determine which humor base you are trying to focus on increasing or
reducing. I've also noticed a great tendency, at least in Platina, to
mention full recipes for foods he considers very harmful and that he
wouldn't even serve to his enemies. Yet he lists the recipe, and some
of them with an obvious imbalance, due to spicing or whatever, in
humors. The only conclusion I can really see for this is that Platina
presents us with recipes of foods that people are eating, but that he
feels they should not be eating for health purposes.

I guess some of the period manuscripts read too much like a modern
health-food diet book, in that they are great for those who want
healthy foods. But, if you just want good taste, you'll ignore those
cookbooks and keep at what you were already doing, or modify them to
suit your own tastes.

Don't get me wrong, I think humor theories were an important part of
shaping the foods people ate and in the way they ate them and should
be of import and consideration for the way we try to recreate those
foods. I simply don't feel they were so pervasive that we would have
to make a strong attempt to follow exact spicing/saucing instructions
for dishes in those cookbooks if we have a taste preference for
something a bit different. Why else would so many recipes say to add
"goode herbes" and be so vague about measurements most of the time. I
guess I might be too blind to think that cooks of the time were not as
creative as cooks today are, despite prevailing health concerns.

Returning to the sauce issue, however, I would then to agree with Lord
Ras and Lady Katherine that if you wanted to substitute fro flavor, as
I would consider an acceptable premise based on the above, I would
look for another period sauce to use. Although I must say that a
Camaline Sauce can be fairly varied in flavor based on the type of
wine, verjuice, vinegar, etc. and the amounts of spices and such you
use. The same can be said of most other sauces, not to mention
whatever way the meat itself may have been spiced during cooking, if
you find recipes for doing so. (I'm not sure about doing such for
salmon/fish, per se, but it was not uncommon for most other types of
meats to be cooked/roasted with spices.)

Honos Servio,
Lionardo Acquistapace, Barony of Bjornsborg, Ansteorra
(mka Lenny Zimmermann, San Antonio, TX)
zarlor at acm.org

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