SC - Period Recipes

[Philip & Susan Troy]

At 11:48 AM -0500 6/6/97, Sue Wensel wrote:

>Nonetheless, that people are being overwhelmed by
>requests for documentation is no less true and the sheer volume of requests is
>quite daunting.

I don't think I would describe my usual response to someone posting a
recipe without a source as exactly a "request for documentation"--that
would imply that I assumed it was a period recipe. My usual response is
some version of the query "do you have a period source for that?"--which
permits the legitimate answer "no."

I think I usually have three different reasons for posting such a query:

1. The poster may in fact have a period source for the recipe, in which
case I would like to know about it.

2. The poster may not have a period source for the recipe, in which case I
would like other people on the list to be aware of the fact. In my
experience, a surprising number of people in the SCA simply take it for
granted that things published in T.I. or C.A., or done by an experienced
SCA person, are period unless stated not to be.

3. The poster may not have a period source for the recipe, and it may not
have seriously occurred to him that SCA cooking could be medieval rather
than medievaloid--that lots of people do have period sources for recipes,
and that it might be worth his trying to work from such. This is probably
less common now than it was ten or fifteen years ago, and less common on a
list such as this than in the general SCA population, but it is still a
possibility.


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