SC - The Dom AND the Rock

[geneviamoas@juno.com]

At 6:55 PM -0400 6/14/98, Korrin S DaArdain wrote:

>I would think that a cook in the middle ages having not had his regular
>food shipment arrive, or he ran out of such-&-such spice, would be
>improvising all over the place. And as long as the result is delicious
>and does not poison the lord of the house then what does it matter if the
>recipe was not followed exactly?
>
>The problem is that we of the current middle ages are telling ourselves
>that the proper "medieval" cook would never have improvised in the face
>of that damn goat having just eaten his herb garden and will now be
>served for dinner the next eve.

Nobody is saying that.

What we are saying is that if we, as 20th century people with (by medieval
standards) a very superficial knowledge of medieval cooking, improvise, the
result is less likely to correspond to what a real medieval cook would do
than if we followed the recipe. We know their written recipes; we don't
know their improvised ones, and we have no reason to think that the
improvisations that seem natural to us are the same ones that would seem
natural to them.

>If any one of us heads to pennsic (or any other event), and after a full
>set-up and in the middle of cooking finds that they have left
>such-and-such spice on the table at home (only 12 hours one way). Do we
>head home, to the nearest store (that may not have it), grovel at the
>feet of other cooks at pennsic (who also may not have it), or do we
>improvise?

You improvise--and recognize that what you produce as a result is less
likely to be something that would have been made in the middle ages than if
you had not had to improvise.

But I don't believe the initial question was about how you cope with such
emergencies. The question, I thought, was whether if you make up your own
"period recipe" they are really period.

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


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