SC - corn..

[Karen Lyons-McGann]

On Tuesday, April 07, 1998 3:16 AM, david friedman [SMTP:ddfr at best.com]
wrote:
> The practical problem is that once you get east of Persia there are
> essentially no period recipes available--at least so far as I know.
There
> are some Mughal almost-recipes, but they are south of the silk route.
So
> silk route feasts tend to end up doing modern ethnic instead of
period.

Well...
Remembering that the "Silk Route" was a road to be traveled, and not a
country with a specific cuisine, you could do a feast from the
standpoint of the merchants plying the route, and not the countries they
passed through...

It is unlikely that traders along the Silk Route used any but their own
native cuisine, except for occasional curiosities. Genoese or Venetian
Merchants, for example, would probably have tried to cook Genoese or
Venetian food, and use ingredient substitutions, if they had to. 
So you can have a Silk Route Feaste, and use the cuisine of a country
which was known to have plied the Route, such as Turkey, and add
judicious substitutions of far eastern ingredients such as rice or Soya
in certain of the dishes. Even better if there is evidence that the
substitutions were actually used, from period accounts of the travels.

I think that may solve the "thematic" problem, with out having to cook
modern food.

Brandu
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