SC - RE: creativity vs. blatant disregard

[david friedman]

At 5:08 PM -0400 6/26/98, Christi Redeker wrote:
>Cariadoc wrote:
>
>>Making changes is period--the problem is that we don't know what the
>>changes are that they would make, and the changes we would make to a period
>>recipe are not necessarily the same as the ones they would make.
>
>True.  But in the example of  "Good spices" aren't we making the same
>changes we would by substituting a single spice or ingredient we would
>rather use?  My  decision on a "good spice" may be completely different from
>Sir Gunthars.  And neither of us may have documentation for either of our
>blends.

And the result is that you are less sure you are doing what they would have
done than if the recipe had been more precise. If the recipe is precise
about what spice to use and you change it anyway, you are making it
somewhat less likely that it is what they would have done--how much less
likely depends on the particular case.

When people are told something is period, they then draw further
conclusions from it. An example is a dish someone told us was period--a
14th or 15th c. English meat dish garnished with oranges and lemons, as I
recall. Betty and I were suspicious, so we asked for the source. It turned
out that the recipe was from a secondary source, which indeed specified
oranges and lemons. The original said to "garnish with fruits." So the
author of the secondary source, by putting in her guess (or, more likely,
what she thought would taste better), was spreading misinformation--if, as
I think is the case, oranges and lemons would not have been used in that
way at that time. One cannot entirely avoid that risk--no doubt some of my
guesses have been wrong too--but one can at least minimize it.

SCA "knowledge" is largely very unreliable oral tradition, based on the
mistaken idea that the fact you encounter something in the SCA is a good
reason to believe it is period--and I think one should avoid making it
worse than it is.

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


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