SC - lying in period

[Mary Morman]

> Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 18:53:57 -0700
> From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
> Subject: Re: SC - Are creations period?
> 
> >Your logic falters in your example.  We DO have documentation of the
> >writing of both the text and music of The Star Spangled Banner.  Your
> >point is well taken, but the example a bit too far off.
> 
> But we cannot prove that somebody else did not write the same tune four
> hundred years earlier. Nor can we (or at least I) prove that the modern
> "author" wasn't setting the words to music based on a folk tune that his
> grandfather brought over from the old country--and that nobody happened to
> write down previously.

As a matter of fact, the tune is documantable as quite a few years older
than the lyric, for what that's worth.
> 
> We can, of course, get evidence, based on what we know of period styles,
> that may make it unlikely that the tune is period--and similarly for
> cooking. But what we cannot do, in either case, is jump from the fact that
> they did some things we don't know about to the conclusion that anything
> they could have done, they did--which I think is the jump necessary to
> justify the argument I was responding to.

I hope I'm not being repetitive: I've been glossing over much of this
thread. Just on the off chance that a different analogy might prove
valuable, consider this:

You are trying to learn how baseball is played. You know that it is
played with a bat, a ball, and gloves for some of the players, who tend
to wear peaked caps. You are standing in front of a high, thick wooden
fence, unable to see the game in progress, but notice a knothole in the
fence, which is thick enough to provide you with a tunnel-vision effect,
and which provides you with a view, effectively, of activities in center
field, second base, the pitcher's mound, and home plate. Let's suppose
the pitcher is short ;  ).

You are unable to see any of the play in left or right fields, first or
third base. So, you are left with a choice: you can imagine what might
be done with the bat, ball, gloves, etc., and come up, by chance, with
either an accurate or a distorted view of how baseball is played. Based
on the number of ways one could be incorrect (theoretically infinite)
versus the way one could be correct (one, for practical purposes) the
odds are distinctly in favor of inaccuracy. Or, you can look through the
hole in the fence, and use that information to speculate intelligently
as to the parts of the picture you are missing. I'd say looking through
the hole provides you with an incomplete, but still more accurate, sense
of how the game is played, than uninformed speculation. Now, speculation
does have some value, and it is only as good as the information on which
it is based, but as long as it is clearly identified as speculation,
there shouldn't be a problem.

So, what does this have to do with period cookery? Only this: extant
recipes and other written sources from the period we are studying are
like the hole in the fence. Do they give us a complete picture?
Probably, almost certainly, not. Do they provide us a better starting
point than a basic knowledge of Old World versus New World ingredients?
Yes, because they tell us most of that anyway, but much more. 

I know a Lady whose area of specialization is early period Celtic study.
She cooks a lot, and her method of research tends to involve finding
modern dishes from the five or six known surviving Celtic cultures, and
either choosing those that call for Pre-Columbian European foods, or
eliminating the New World foods from a dish, producing things like, for
example, colcannon without potatoes, which is  a perfectly fine creamy
pottage of cabbage and leeks. The only problem is that really have no
reason to believe Fionn, Cuchullain, Vercingetorix, Caratacus, or, for
that matter, Asterix the Gaul ever ate the dish, other than a vague,
"Well, they coulda, ya know!"

That just happens to be an area of culinary study about which very
little is actually _known_. For those who wish to study and recreate
that aspect of period life, speculation is all that's available. Since
is has to be speculative, though, I would be very hesitant to call such
dishes "period". 

I dislike the use of the adjective "period" in questions of
acceptability within the scope of the SCA: it seems most often asked by
people who are more interested in justifying some preconceived notion of
what was "period", rather than in learning as much as they can about the
given aspect of life in period, and drawing a conclusion based on all
the available evidence.

Adamantius  
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
============================================================================

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".

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