SC - Plaintive whine about sourcing....

[Karen Farris]

The word flits round the Forum --
"Adamantius is sticking his Roman nose into the issue again!"

In general I have a slight problem with the idea of a book of medieval
recipes and redactions  being organized according to "appetizers,
salads, side dishes, etc." From there to the 60-minute gourmet and the
microwave-friendly recipe section is but a short step! I'm inclined to
favor the organization Taillevent uses: Thick pottages, thin pottages,
boiled sauces, unboiled sauces, roasts, etc. The problem here seems to
be that 20th-century folk have a different interpretation of a "course":
a four course meal today might consist of an appetizer or a soup, an
entree with accompaniments, a salad, and a sweet course. This is almost
entirely alien to the medieval European's view  of a course, and, for
that matter, a feastday meal. The modern Chinese think this is pretty
funny too, by the way.

How would it be if you had two tables of contents, representing the
dishes served in and out of persona, respectively? In other words, you
could go with a typical period version of how to organize the dishes, as
Katerine, Mar Joshua, and others have suggested, and have a separate
table of contents for those 20th-century folks looking for a low-calorie
lunch dish to impress the history department with (or whatever).

The question of whether an index, per se, is necessary is open to a
certain amount of debate, but it probably depends on the scope and the
complexity of the book itself. If it were me, I'd like to see an index
that showed every reference in the book to anchovies, for example. This
is, of course, a LOT of work, and not strictly necessary for most
people's needs. Up to you! 

Terry Nutter wrote:

> 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

Adamantius