SC - SC Redactions...
Charles McCN
charlesn at sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au
Tue Oct 28 16:11:16 PST 1997
Somebody suggested we could all get together and come up with 'the right'
"period" redaction.
I work in a period of about 300 years, and I think there are very
significant differences in food from the beginning to the end of it. So
we should have several 'period' versions. There are also regional variations.
But the biggest problem I have with it is that it is not a period
appproach in the first place. If there were an approved, minutely measured
and carefully calibrated set of instructions they would have written them
down. There wasn't, and we shouldn't presume to produce them.
On the other hand, a group of people each redacting the same recipe, or
one person trying it several ways, can produce an interesting set of
results - several slightly different dishes, and most importantly an
understanding of what the influences that produce a given effect might be.
This is how I do my own redactions - cook the recipe from memory
til I like it, then check that I still have a valid interpretation of te
original recipe (it is very easy when doing it from memory over a couple
of years to lose the original completely. That is not necessarily a bad
thing, but means that it is no longer a redaction)
Does anyone know what the literacy rate of medieval cooks was? There are
some fundamental questions that arise if there were illiterate cooks.
There is also the great unanswerable -why were cookbooks written?
Was it to provide a written source for people to learn to cook, or was it
to describe a new style of cookery coming into vogue, or was it an
exercise in vanity publishing or was it...
Charles
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