SC - Intro-Unsub-Cooking?

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 97-07-07 12:40:33 EDT, you write:

<<  I just received several unsub posts and a post about my personal E-mail
<< address...Ok, I'm like duh...What would you like me to do exactly?
I suspect the unsub requests were mistakes by the posters, sent to the list
instead of the list administrator, because I received them too. THe request
for the personal address was sent because sometimes people like to ask
questions or follow-up posts in private if they stray too far from the
subject of the list.  You're not required to give it unless you want to.
 
<<Is this a list more for the mideval role players or as I thought, a period
style
 cooking list, which to me entails recipes? I'm glad you folks have a grown
up
 dress up game you like to play, (and people think cross dressers are
 strange..LOL).. but I was interested in recipes.>>
The SCA isn't so much a role-playing game as a sort of living history group,
similar to the Civil War and Revolutionary War groups most people are
familiar with.  As such, we're not only interested in the recipes themselves,
but also in the steps that had to be done to prepare food for cooking, to
gather or kill it, and what foods would be available at what seasons.  Also
what it was cooked in or over in medieval times, when certain foods reached
different areas, and where to find spices mentioned in the recipes that are
now difficult to find.  All of these things are a part of cooking, and part
of what we are trying to reconstruct, and therefore of interest to us. 

<< If I'm mistaken, let me know. maybe the misrepresentation in the title
sca-<<COOKS is why people are unsubbing..its not what they thought.I don't
really care <<if someone from 300 years ago knew how to butcher meat..its a
moot point. If I am <<correct in my assumption, please let me know so I can
unsub too. As stated in <<my intro, I am a gourmet cook and not into the
dress up game scene, only <<recipes.

Recipes appear quite frequently, both in the original forms and in redacted
forms to be used by the modern cooks.  But, as I said, recipes are not all
there is to cooking, especially when you are trying to recreate food from
another time period for a living history group.  The title SCA-Cooks is not
in any way a misrepresentation - we are members of a medieval re-creation
group called the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), and we are talking
about knowledge needed to recreate period cooking, incluidng recipes as a
portion of that knowledge.  Whether or not there was anyone around who knew
how to butcher meat is of vital importance when you are trying to figure out
what a medieval household was likely to eat in the course of a day - if there
was no one to butcher, there would be no fresh meat, only preserved meat or
other foods entirely.

I'm sorry if you feel the list is not meeting your personal needs, but it is
meeting needs of members of the SCA whom it was set up to serve.  If you are
willing to overlook a certain amount of discussion of topics you are not
interested in, you will likely encounter a wide variety of recipes - in the
last month we've had recipes posted for jowtes of almond milke (almond milk
soup with herbs), a salmon and eel pie, and several other items, all of which
some of us got to eat at a medieval recreation feast cooked by the person who
redacted and posted the recipes.  So if you hang in there, you will indeed
get medieval recipes - but also other information about WHY people ate the
way they did in that time period.

<< I did notice a reference to some old cookbooks, are they available?  >>
 
Certainly there are some available commercially.  One I can think of is a
book called _Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks_, by Constance B.
Hieatt and Sharon Butler, ISBN 0-8020-6366-7 (this is the first edition;
there is a second edition out, but I don't have it).  The recipes are chosen
from a variety of medieval manuscripts including _Le Menagier of Paris_
(1393) and _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_.  So this is not technically
an "old cookbook", but a collection of recipes from several old cookbooks.

Barbara Croll (known in the SCA, and therefore on this list, as Brangwayna
Morgan)