SC - Cooking in a Period Environment

[david friedman]

At 9:50 PM +0100 6/30/97, Angie Capozello wrote:

>What a great idea!  There is never enough teaching of cooking techniques
>around here.

>From time to time Betty and I do a cooking workshop in our kitchen. The
basic idea is that we select as many period recipes as there are going to
be people and get the ingredients. At about 1:00 on Saturday people start
showing up. When you arrive, we hand you a stack of printouts of recipes;
you pick one. You spend the afternoon making it, with us to give advice,
and writing down in precise detail everything you do. As each dish is
finished, everyone tries it and makes comments. When it is over, we put
into the computer the information on how the dish was done and how it
turned out and what should be changed next time.

Ideally, all of the recipes are being done for the first time, since the
objective is for the people attending to discover that it is really not
that hard to work from a primary source recipe. The only problem with this
is that we accumulate a lot of half-worked out recipes. So in practice, we
have some retries as well. We try to give them to the more experienced
people, so that the new people can have the fun of actually working from
scratch.

It's a pleasant way of spending a Saturday afternoon, and we've never yet
had to send out for pizza. All it requires is at least one experienced
period cook, access to sources, and a kitchen. If any of you are in the bay
area and interested in attending one, let us know.

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