SC - Redaction Philosophy: You Asked For It! (long)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Unto the Readers of the SCA-Cooks List, Greetings from Gideanus Tacitus
Adamantius!

I hope you will forgive my presumption: the Excellent and Noble Tibor
having been asked to provide his philosophy on the redaction of period
recipes, APPEARED to have passed the ball. As it happens, it was a
medicine ball, striking me in the pit of the abdomen with a good deal of
force. If the ball was intended for someone else, I trust you will file
all this with the rest of the vapid maunderings I have seen fit to
post... .

My philosophy, if I have one, is this: the period recipe is an important
tool in creating an all-around period atmosphere. We are supposed, more
or less, to be acting in all ways as period people, so we try to dress
and act appropriately to our personae. So too shouldwe eat that way, if
possible. I'm not going to get into a whole authenticity issue. But a
good chunk of what we do is the dedicated suspension of disbelief: if,
say, Tibor and I were in a room at an event together, it might strike
one as odd that a 14th century Savoyard (It is 14th century, isn’t it?)
and a 5th century Romanized Briton would hobnob, but the glory of our
Society is that we can, and that wherever and whenever it is that this
is happening, it almost certainly isn’t 20th century North America, or
Europe, or Australia, or wherever. That being the case, why eat food
that screams, “20th Century!!!”?  People in the society frequently
consider it bad manners to introduce a modern element that would spoil
the game. The Noble Lady Dierdiu and I recently exchanged a series of
e-mails about Macintosh computers; we would not have done this at an
event, because it would have caused dozens of surrounding SCAdians to
suddenly snap out of it. Bringing in an obviously non-period food can be
just as jarring.

I’m willing to concede, and people will probably disagree with me about
this, that there are times when being extremely authentic in one area
could lead to the crashing down of the entire game, and under those
conditions it is sometimes better to go with a less authentic version.
So, for example, the gentleman I heard about several years ago (I think
in Ansteorra, but I could be wrong) who added sand and gravel to his
bread recipe on the grounds that it belonged in a period loaf, not only
misrepresented period bread (period folks’ teeth were no better then
than ours are now; in fact, they were probably worse), but also wasted
good food, probably all to prove the very questionable point that we
shouldn’t try to be authentic in the area of food in the first place.
It’s kind of like when my six-year-old son says, “You want me to clean
my room? Fine. I’ll spend the rest of my life doing nothing but clean my
room. I’ll stand there waiting for a speck of dust to come, so I can
clean it up right away.” Both are exaggerated responses to demands the
parties felt were unreasonable, but actually weren’t. This, by the way,
is an example of what we have come to call Cariadoc’s Law, which states
that we should not let the best (really authentic period bread or a nice
clean room) become the enemy (to the point of ridiculous exaggeration
and impossibility) of the good (a reasonably good attempt). Or, to put
it another way, you can’t let yourself argue that because perfection is
impossible, there’s no point in trying.  

Enough of the soapbox stuff. Let’s get to the how-to.

I began to suspect, yesterday, that a good deal of the problem people
have with period recipes is with language. Tibor supplied a period
recipe for boiled perch which was just a bit more simple than some of
the others, and didn’t become too funky in the language department. Many
people gave it a shot, and, seeming to expect all kind of disasters,
came up smelling like fis-- I mean roses ; ) . And what’s more, although
everyone put their own little personal touches on the dish, it always
remained recognizably the same dish. For those who suggested that they
thought they must have done it wrong, what does that suggest to you? To
me it suggests you did it right. The fact that the recipe was sometimes
vague, supplying no cooking times, no temperatures, and no ingredient
quantities didn’t seem to be too much of a problem, so long as you had
an idea of what you wanted the dish to be like in the end. This was
easier in this recipe than in some of the others, which I hope some day
you’ll try your hand at, but it’s an area where experience comes in
really handy.

Essentially, what people did was to go through the recipe’s
instructions, and act as if they were following them, supplying from
their own experience or intuition the information needed to fill in any
blank spots in the recipe. What were we all skimming from the top in the
recipe? There was nothing in the water yet except salt. So, people
assumed that either the salt was impure and produced a scum on top, or
that they were expected to add the fish trimmings to make a stock. I
have my own opinion on this question which it will be simpler not to
include here. The point is that those of us who aren’t period cooks
(i.e. all of us) were able to get through a recipe with a few logical
gaps in it and produce a “virtual” dish that was not only “virtually”
yummy (and I have no doubt that the real thing is great, too), but which
an actual period cook would be proud of.

So here, for those of you who’ve read this far, is the Primary Rule of
Cooking from Period Recipes: “Whenever Possible, Just Do What the Recipe
Says. That’s what it’s there for.” You’ve probably already figured this
part out.

As for language, probably the best way (as per Lady Katerine Rountre) is
to just read from the period sources until you don’t find it
intimidating. “Curye on Inglysche” has a fine glossary with notes, for
example. Not a whole heck of a lot different from tackling Chaucer for
the first time, and certainly far easier than dealing with Beowulf in
Anglo-Saxon, another not-impossible task. Besides, it’s about a subject
we are all interested in: food.

A way to cheat at this a bit is to use translated period sources. This
could include, say, Terence Scully’s translation of the Viandier of
Taillevent. There will still be those gaps in the recipe that will need
to be interpreted. But at least Scully has done the work of translating
it from medieval French into modern English. People in and out of the
SCA have done many fine translations of period sources that weren’t in
English originally. These include the various Arabic and Andalusian
sources, Das Buoch Von Guter Speiss, and a host of others. The latest
edition of His Grace Cariadoc’s Collection of Medieval and Renaissance
Cookbooks is an extremely large bang for the buck in this area. You can
probably find people selling this at the Pennsic War for not very much.

Last, but not least, is the fact that you do need to have some
foundation in basic cookery. It will be a great help to know how food
will behave under a given set of circumstances, so a bit of kitchen
chemistry, which can be gleaned from various modern cookbooks (the more
basic, but comprehensive, the better: try Fanny Farmer, or the Joy of
Cooking, or something by James Beard), will be helpful. If you later
decide you’re really interested in the physical and chemical wizardry of
cooking, I suggest you go out and find Harold McGee’s “On Food and
Cooking”, and “The Curious Cook”. Maybe Margaret Visser’s “Much Depends
on Dinner”, too.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll end up serving modern food from these
modern cookbooks (although if you did, you could do worse), but they
will help you develop a certain second nature or intuition about what
many of the period recipes are talking about. You’ll know a stew from a
soup from a pie, and act accordingly, which is a good part of the
redactor’s art right there. 

Good luck and Happy Hunting!

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com


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