SC - Almond milk - IP

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 11:59:34 -0800
> From: kat <kat at kagan.com>
> Subject: SC - help! - How to run a cooking symposium?

>         Also, (final, pathetic, whimpering plea) does ANYONE know what the philosophy > is behind menu-planning in period times?  I feel a little silly just choosing dishes at 
> random and stuffing them into a remove... dare I assume that is what everyone on this list > tends to do, since no one has come up with a better answer as of yet?

What I generally have done in the past is to try to come up with a nice
broad spectrum of dishes related at least somewhat by country of origin
and century. For example, even if I don't stick entirely to one source
for recipes, I normally try not to serve dishes from, say, Digby,
alongside dishes from Taillevent. Apart from the English Channel in
between, there's close to three hundred years.

I also take into account, at least to some minor extent, modern
expectations as to what constitutes a balanced meal. Looking at each
course as a complete table setting, I try to include a starch of some
sort, a meat or two, a veg or two, etc. I don't have all my meat dishes
in one course, and eight kinds of sweets at the end.

Color is also a factor, although there's no reason to assume the color
sense of Chiquart and Wolfgang Puck would be the same. Just another
thing to bear in mind. Don't put all your white dishes in one course,
unless you intend to for some reason.

Finally, there's the medical end, which we have discussed already, but
the gist is this: you should read either Terence Scully's "Art of
Cookery In The Middle Ages", or the notes to his translation of the
different Taillevent manuscripts. I'll bet there's something about this
in Jonathan Miller's "The Body In Question," but I wouldn't swear to it.
A vast simplification of it would be to suggest nuts in various forms at
the beginning of the meal, either sugared, or as almond milk, or
whatever (both nuts and sugar serving to open the stomach), with meat
dishes, more or less ascending the evolutionary ladder, as it were, in
the middle of the meal. Cheese dishes and cream would be served near or
at the end of the meal, since cheese and other dairy products were
thought to close the stomach up again. While this is happening, you pop
in the spice dragees and confits, or perhaps hippocras, usually with
wafers, as the capper. Spices provided heat, necessary for good
digestion.

In a way, rather like dumping the baking soda in with the vinegar before
tightening the lid...

Typical theory of the period suggested that this was the best way to
insure perfect digestion. Of course, period menus don't always seem to
follow the medical theory to any great extent, but then we know people
often disregarded the advice of their doctors, then as now.

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
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