SC - Columbus menu II

[Stephen Bloch]

I just finished wading through that torrent of SCA-COOKS messages,
and I am caught up for the first time in about a month.  A few comments:

Shortly after I started using Usenet and mailing lists (back in the days
of alt.sca, when we wrote our messages on stone tablets :-), I decided I
would not respond to any message until I had at least skimmed the
subsequent messages in that list or newsgroup (or thread thereof), lest
I write essentially the same thing half a dozen other people had written.
Instead, I mark them as unread, or don't delete them, or file them in a
"respond-to" folder, or something.  May I humbly suggest a similar
policy for other people on this list, that we may have fewer duplicate
posts and a higher ratio of information to sheer megabytes?  Likewise,
try not to post messages that simply say "me too".  Third, check the
"To:" address before you send a message, and make sure private email is
sent to an individual rather than the list.  (Yes, it's more difficult
with a mailing list than with a newsgroup, and I've made the same
mistake myself, just a few months ago.  But try.)

OK, now on to the first message I wanted to reply to.

> ---Uduido at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > << so summer squash (patty pans, zucchini etc) are new 
> > world and winter squash
> >  (gourds, acorn etc) are old world/period??  
> > Or the other way round? or neither?
> >  -brid
> > 
> > Nope. Cucumbers, watermelons, and luffa gourds are old 
> > world the rest are new
> > world. 
> > 
> > Lord Ras
 
To which Kihe Blackeagle / Amr ibn Majid al-Bakri al-Amra / Mike C. Baker
replied:
> just because a given
> food item is "new world" does NOT mean that it is
> non-period for Europeans.
> 
> Especially for European colonists, explorers, conquistadores,
> and similar folk it MUST be remembered that they ate and
> adopted much of the local foods. Significant items were
> sent back to the courts of Europe and entered into regular
> cultivation fairly early on as well (significantly prior
> to 1600CE). While many such items were centuries away from
> regular appearances upon the commoner's table, others were
> embraced quickly and widely.
> 
> In the Western Hemisphere (New World) colonies and camps,
> it would have been ludicrous to insist only upon European
> varieties & species, particularly when native peoples 
> shared their knowledge of edible plants and animals....

As long as "period" is defined as pre-1600 or 1650 or whatever it is
this week, yes, it's possible for Europeans to have consumed potatoes,
capsicum peppers, cocoa, maize, turkey, tobacco, etc. at that time.
We have solid evidence that colonists did consume many of those things.
For a FEW of those New World food sources, we have evidence that people
back in Europe tried them before 1600.  Off the top of my head, I can't
think of any that "were embraced quickly and widely", but I'll concede
that some may have been.  Perhaps tobacco.

However, I'm not interested in recreating the (North or South) American
colonies, and I'm not interested in recreating the novelty food items
that a few people tried at the end of a period whose only claim to
historical coherence is that it's defined in the SCA's governing
documents.  I'm interested in recreating medieval European cookery.
1492 qualifies at least arguably as Renaissance, and most of these
New World items weren't actually in widespread use until the Baroque.

I argued on the Rialto, probably eight or nine years ago, that a more
sensible cutoff date for the SCA would be 1500, a round number achieved
by combining a number of landmark dates that might be said to "end the
Middle Ages", e.g. Columbus's voyage in 1492, the Reconquista of Spain
in 1492, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Protestant Reformation
in the early 1500's, and the development of both perspective and movable
type in the mid-to-late 1400's.  Of course, the SCA has too much social
inertia to suddenly go back and chop off a century or more from its
scope, but I really don't think a cuisine with lots of New World
components has much in common with, or provides much information about,
any medieval cuisine.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University
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