SC - _Fabulous Feasts_

[Stephen Bloch]

> Note to Lord Ras:  I did try (just out of twisted, morbid curiosity) 
> the recipe for "Fruytes Ryal Rice: Artichokes in Blueberry Rice"...it 
> was GHASTLY, so your comment cheered me up immensely - maybe it's not 
> me, maybe it's the recipe itself!!

After a few years of SCA feasts and pot-lucks, you develop the ability
to detect a Fabulous Feasts recipe, even if you haven't read that
particular recipe.  I think Cosman decided that medieval food gloried
in contrasting or surprising flavors and colors, and therefore
concluded that anything with contrasting or surprising flavors and
colors was medieval food, even if many of the ingredients are native
either to the New World or to the laboratories of General Foods.
Almost every dish must combine sweet, fruity flavors with savory ones.
There's a lot of fish, but mysteriously never served by itself with a
simple sauce -- it requires fruit.  Some of the more infamous recipes
are the "artichokes in blueberry rice" you discovered, the "pears
stuffed with lentils and cranberries", the "chicken stuffed with
lentils, cherries, and cheese", the "salmon and fruit tart", and the
parsley bread.  The parsley bread differs from the rest in being
actually fairly tasty, but since there is indeed (as Cosman says) a
severe shortage of medieval bread recipes, it draws people's
attention, and nobody else has been able to find a source for it.

_Fabulous Feasts_ also includes a roux-based white sauce, dated
precisely to 1357 Cesena, Italy (we ought to be able to pin down the
source from that, wouldn't you think?), hundreds of years before any
other roux-based sauce I've heard of.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University