SC - Period Recipes

[david friedman]

At 10:27 AM -0400 6/9/97, Varju at aol.com wrote:
><<The objective is to get the person looking through the cookbook. . .>>
>
>But what is one to do when there seems to be very little recorded information
>on the region of interest?  I know it would be easiest to do period recipes
>from Western Europe, but I can't quite do it.  i guess i'm just too stubborn
>and want to stay true to my region. (Hungary specifically, but I'll take
>anything from Eastern Europe).  this is thge whole reason I do horribly
>non-period cooking, except for my one period Hungarian recipe.

Domostroi has a few recipes, and Russia is in Eastern Europe. There is a
17th c. Hungarian translation of a 16th century German cookbook; I have
photocopies of both. What is your one period Hungarian recipe, and where is
it from?

I have seen a reference in a book on Hungarian cooking to a manuscript c.
1400, but I have no idea whether it has ever been published.

>And perhaps I'm missing the boat but isn't the 1500's part of the time period
>we are reconstructing?  If so, what is wrong with using New World ingredients
>that were introduced and used during that time?

1. New world ingredients seem to have mostly come into use late sixteenth
century or thereafter; my assumption is that it is only reasonable to use
them in a dish if you actually have a pre-1600 recipe using the New World
ingredient. Or in other words, my presumption is that a recipe using a New
World ingredient is out of period, but it is a rebuttable presumption.

2. I spend most of my life surrounded by a cuisine that uses New World
ingredients, so while there isn't anything "wrong" with using one where you
actually have a suitable recipe, I don't see much point in trying to
squeeze them in, and thus make the cooking more like what we are already
used to. Obviously that would not apply to sixteenth century recipes that
used the New World ingredient in some odd and interesting way unlike the
way it is used now.

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