SC - Marrow

[Kimib2@aol.com]

Peters, Rise J. wrote:
> 
> Murkial raised a good question about judging criteria (extra material
> snipped for brevity):
> 
> Maybe the problem with cooking is that judges don't understand the
> interpretive aspects of cooking from medieval recipes?  Or that we are still
> in the stage of learning to do exact copies, whatever that means?
> 
> =Caitlin

I'm inclined to agree, but perhaps take it a step further. If I
understand what you're saying, it seems as if judges sometimes don't
appreciate the fact that the occasional judgement call is required
within the acceptable guidelines of a period recipe, and see no
difference between that and deliberate, albeit informed or otherwise,
deviation from a period set of instructions.

The questions that need to be asked would seem to be, more or less, is
the item under consideration a recognizable variation on a known period
theme, or is it something that was thrown together haphazardly in the
name of "creativity"? Did, for example, the entrant decide that a sweet,
wine-based pottage with shredded capon breast, wasn't good (since we all
know period food isn't ;  )  )  and decide to make a sweet wine-based
glaze for roast chicken, _and call it mawmenny_, using either a period
mawmenny recipe as documentation, or the claim that it was just
something the entrant whipped up out of his or her vast store of
culinary knowledge of the period?

In any case, my suspicion is that many of the people judging A&S
competitions don't have the education in this field to make such a
distinction. Many of them are authorities on other art forms, and don't
know much about cookery. While there is a certain inherent logic that
might make an authority on costume able to tell good cooking
documentation from bad, since some of the rules more or less transcend
the art form. 

It certainly could be a legitimate argument to claim that slavish
devotion to the fine details of a period recipe prevents one from being
really creative, but that is not the same as abandoning everything we've
learned (or haven't learned, in some cases) and saying, effectively,
"I'd rather be free to exercise my creativity without the constraints
imposed by this period recipe, so I'll make whatever the heck I want."

As has been suggested, it's really hard, sometimes, to distinguish
between how a period artist would have done something on the spur of the
moment, and the way in which a modern person might arbitrarily deviate
from a period set of instructions in the name of creativity. And,
unfortunately, _most_ of what we have to work from are the recipes
themselves. And, also unfortunately, too many SCA cooks are abandoning
the recipes as guidelines for creativity, claiming they can't be
creative while following some stodgy old recipe, before fully exploring
and understanding the recipe corpus available. 

I can't say I know enough about period cookery from the recipes, or the
infamous "archaological evidence" to know for sure what is, or is not, a
variation on a period recipe that would have been acceptable to a period
cook. Remember that that period artist, painting a scene of a Coronation
from life, has been studying painting for much of his life, and wouldn't
be likely to say, "I've seen several medieval paintings, and painted a
few, and now I'm going to something completely different, because I'm
feeling really creative, and the old masters in my field didn't really
know what they were doing, anyway." Many of the more "creative" cooks in
the SCA come off sounding that way, I believe. 

Adamantius   
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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