SC - Judging-OT

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Balldrich wrote:

>Please consider this:  If we can cook without writing everything down 
>so did period cooks.  If we keep secrets about ingredients and how we 
>use them so did period cooks.  If we experiment with available food 
>stuffs and spices and methods of cooking so did period cooks.  How 
>else did they ever come up with something "new" and wonderful for us 
>to try?  

Yes, but adding ingredients or mixing foods that seem logical to us may 
_not_ have been considered logical or appropriate in the time period 
the modern person purports to cook from.  I think _that_ is the point 
that some are trying to make.  We eat food combinations and use spices 
for which we can't find medieval/Renaissance equivalents.  But, SCAers 
will say that X existed in period and so did Y so _somebody_ probably 
used them.

Now, I had a father who concocted combinations of things that most 
modern folk wouldn't eat.  He put blueberry juice in milk.  True, there 
are blueberry _milkshakes_ but I haven't seen people drinking 
blue-colored, berry-flavored plain milk.  (And, re-constituted powdered 
skim milk at that!)  Stop and think about what someone might 
"reconstruct" for our time - tuna-topped yogurt (both popular lunch 
ingredients) with a colorful salsa drizzled over it.  They all exist in 
our period.  They all are documentable as lunch foods.  Would _we_ eat 
such a combination?  I doubt it.  Would someone try it in this century? 
 Possibly, but not as a serious meal to be served to guests.  Given the 
arguments SCAers put on their "documentation", though, this should pass 
as a period lunch for 1998 by an SCAer in 2598.

The point has been made elsewhere that until we are thorougly expert in 
the cookery of a particular country at a particular time, until we know 
the recipes by heart as well as the cook did then, we really can't make 
up our own combinations (without showing a similar combination in the 
cookery corpus for the relevant time and place) and claim that they are 
"period".

Alys Katharine, long-winded 
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