SC - Jellies vs. aspics

[Angie Malone]

Hey all from Anne-Marie

For me, I consider two schools of thought.

There's period food, which we attempt through careful reproduction of
recipes, no subbing, no changing the cooking methods (like carmelizing the
onions because you like them better that way), no leaving stuff out becuase
"it sounds icky". You read every copy of every cookbook you can get your
hands on to figure out what they mean by "gode spice", and develop
concordances (ie huge spreadsheets of all the ingredients of every
bukkenade, for example) to see what they did where and when, ie what MAKES
it bukkenade. Period food is fun becuase its a detective game, trying to
figure out what THEY did, not waht YOU want to do.

There's also "peri-oide" food. That's where you take a medieval concept
(like stewing fruit in red wine and spices), but futz with it and change
the fruit to one you know they had in period, but you dont know of any
examples of it being used this way. You use modern allspice because your
order of grains of paradise and poudre forte havent come from Worldspice
yet. You decide to use white wine rather than red for the folks with
sulfite problems, or make a savory dish sweet because the concept of a fish
tart with fish just sounds nasty to you. Peri-oide food is fun because you
can take medieval recipes and concepts and make some wonderful inventions,
well suited to the modern food weenie palate, and exactly what folks expect
to taste and see...ie modern food in a period style.

Please note that the latter is NOT period food. Though perfectly suited for
the SCA and potentially some of the best food you ever put in your mouth,
it is not truely medieval. At least in my book. And since I can  get the
same outstanding tastes and colors and wonderous things from my collection
of truely period recipes, I leave the peri-oide stuff for situations where
I'm not claiming medieval food.

But then I'm one of those "stuffy purist" types, too! :)
- --AM



- ----------
> From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
> To: sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG
> Subject: Re: SC - Are creations period?
> Date: Sunday, June 14, 1998 5:19 PM
> 
> 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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