*puff pastry* (was Unit alert! was: SC - Long-Period food, bread, etc.)

[david friedman]

Mistress Elizabeth wrote:
>(2)  I do not think rating "invent-it-yourself" as better than a careful
>scholarly job is a good idea.  For one thing, most of our judges are not
>competent to judge whether what you invented is a good job of being
>creative in a period style vs being creative in a more or less
>twentieth-century style--and a lot of the "creative medieval cooking" I
>have seen is the latter.
>
>Note that this is my opinion on what you should do, not on how you should
>act to win competitions--the people who write these criteria probably
>disagree with me.
>
>Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook
>

I have been wondering about this, too. I was rather surprised to see that
this criterion rated above a "conceptual interpretation " of an actual
documentable recipe. In my opinion, the ability to make a period type dish
with period ingredients, utensils, and service, WITHOUT a recipe is equal to
the ability to do the same with a recipe. One takes more kitchen know-how
but also more guess work. And, with a dearth of available research to back
it up, one is not able to give the judges the education they need about your
entry to make a wise decision (which, aside from teaching, is the main
purpose of documentation: to prove that you know a lot about your topic as
represented by your entry, and if necessary, to communicate that fact to a
judge who does not know a lot about your topic).  

In my opinion again, what ranks above this is the ability to combine the
period dish with something complementary. For instance, we could follow a
recipe for preserved barberries, and show them off in a dish for
competition. OTOH, we could preserve those barberries, and show: the
preserving vessel and process, including recipe, sources and research; the
way in which they would have been used (in a tart, over fresh fruit, in a
meat pie, with curd cheese.....), and recipes and research; a presentation
of a typical service around this recipe, appropriate to the source (ie:
Irish table setting and acoutrements for an Irish recipe). Is this over the
top? For your average local A and S, maybe. For a pentathalon such as Ice
Dragon, No. That's what makes a winner.

I suppose I would trust someone eminently educated and experienced in SCA
redactive cookery to "wing it" and call it a period dish. But in a blind
situation, where entrants are not known, and the judges are not necessarily
educated to the level of the entrants, it is hard to tell the expert from
the newbie without explicit documentation.

Aoife


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