SC - bread experiment

[Marilyn Traber]

At 4:43 AM -0600 12/19/98, LYN M PARKINSON wrote:

>Now, all that being so, what is the point of driving for a hour or two to
>find Fava beans just because they were the ones we know were grown?

I think this is actually two questions--one is "what is the point" and the
other is "is it worth the cost?" After all, there are lots of things which
there is some point to doing, but for which the advantages outweigh the
disadvantages. To take one obvious example, there would be large advantages
to doing SCA fighting for real, with real weapons--we would learn more
about what real warfare was like. But they are vastly outweighed by the
disadvantage of getting really killed.

The point is that we don't know enough to be sure what changes from the
original recipe matter and what don't. The more likely we think that a
particular change matters, the stronger the argument for not making it. In
your case, you have some evidence that it doesn't matter, but not all that
much, both because you haven't actually tried fava beans in your experiment
and because there might be differences that wouldn't be obvious from your
experiment. So there is always some benefit to doing things in a more
rather than less authentic way. Whether, in a particular case, that benefit
is worth costs such as an extra few hours of driving, is up to each cook to
decide.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================