Dagonell (or at least David) writes:
> Table of Contents AND back of the book index. (And don't get
> Adamantius mad at me whatever I do! ;-) I was thinking of having the book
> ordered into sections, Appetizers, Main Dishes, Sides, Desserts, etc.
> The Table of Contents would list by meal name and the index would list by
> main ingredient ie, Chicken Dishes... p.16, 23, 34 etc. Acceptable?
My only qualm with David's plans is that the distinction among appetizers,
main dishes, etc. can be a matter of interpretation: three different
people may redact the same original recipe as (by modern standards) a
main dish, a side dish, and a dessert. Or the Lenten version of a main
dish may seem like a side dish to modern palates. There are cases in
which a dish is explicitly categorized in the original source, but only
a small fraction of the corpus, and SCA cooks haven't traditionally
paid much attention to such service information (which often appears in
a different part of the cookbook, or even in a completely different
book, than the recipe).
This is probably not a serious problem for an SCA cookbook, for the
following reason. The relatively good SCA cookbooks, written for an
audience that needs dishes for next month's feast, are primarily a
collection of redactions, supported by their originals. By contrast,
many academic cookbooks (e.g. _Ordinance of Pottage_, _Curye on
Inglysche_, Scully's _Viandier_) are primarily a collection of medieval
recipes, supported by sample redactions. Both sorts of cookbooks are
useful for their intended audiences, and there's a big grey area in
between (e.g. the recipe sections of the _Miscellany_). Anyway,
categorizing the dishes as David suggests makes perfectly good sense
if you think of the book as a collection of redactions.
> One last note; Several (not all) submitters included one line as to where
> the dish had been served recently, e.g King Soandso's Coronation, etc.
> A few are somewhat vague, "Served at Pennsic XX". Is this information
> actually useful?
Katerine commented that this was fairly useless to her. That's my
first impulse too, but I'd like to point out one use for it: on the off
chance that the chef actually designed a whole feast to be coherent, it
allows the reader to see which dishes were served with which. If
that's the intent, it might make sense to add MORE information of this
sort, e.g. which course the dish was in.
mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
Stephen Bloch
sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University