SC - Plaintive whine about sourcing....

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hi, Katerine here.  On the indexing issue --

Constructing a good, complete, usable index is a professional task.  I mean
that literally: there are people who make a living doing only that.  It's as
difficult as that implies; which is why there are so many bad indexes out
there.

Offhand, I'd say that for David/Dagonell's purposes, the following will
satisfy a lot of people:

    * A table of contents that lists not only classes but recipes
    * An alphabetic index of recipes at the end

People who are really into this stuff might also like an index by country
and century of origin, and an index of ingredients.  The first will be 
relatively easy to construct for those recipes whose origin is known; two
additional categories of "unknown" and "SCA original" might be helpful
for some, though it's not clear why you'd want to look up just those....
The index of ingredients will be a pain if the booklet is very long, and
there's no obvious way to cut it down.

A postscript on the organization: it might be more useful to many to break
down by a different concept of "kind of dish".  That is, meat dishes, sub-
categorized by main meat type; vegetable dishes; grains (including pastas,
etc.); fruits; sweets; sauces; and so on.  This still leaves a lot of 
latitude: does one put soups separately, or categorize depending on whether
they have meat or not?  And so on.  But at least it avoids the difficulty
of deciding what's an appetizer, given that medievals really didn't have
that notion.

Then again, some moderns might *want* it organized more like a modern 
cookbook.

One could, of course, try to organize it like a medieval cookbook.  But
medieval cookbooks tended to be organized (when they were at all) either
in terms of the kind of main thing (meat day, suborganized into fowl, 
greater flesh, pastas, etc.; fish day, broken into salt water versus fresh 
water; vegetables -- frequently first when present at all; and so on),
or in terms of kind of preparation (pottages, baked dishes, "sliced" dishes,
etc.), or in terms of the order in which they were served in the meal
(early dishes before later ones), or some combination of the above.  Of
these, the first is relatively natural to modern Americans.  The last
*seems* natural, but isn't when applied to the order in which medievals
served things, since the ordering tended more to be influenced by the 
complexity and delicacy of the dish rather than on what it was made of
or whether it was soup, salad, meat, or what.  So I'm not sure organizing
it along medieval lines would make many people happy.

In other words: you can't please everyone.  Do something reasonable, and hope
for the best.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry