SC - Are creations period?

[david friedman]

korrin.daardain at juno.com writes:

"If I have period ingredients and mix them
in the restrictions of the cooking styles of period, but do not base it
on any period recipe, is it period?"

[For some reason this post hasn't reached me yet, so I am picking it up
through other people's responses. I apologize if I am misunderstanding the
question as a result]

The short answer is "I don't know--and neither do you."

The problem comes from the "restrictions of the cooking styles of period"
part of your proviso. The only way of being confident that a recipe is
consistent with the cooking styles of a particular place and time is if we
have a record of that recipe being made in that place and time.

Absent that, we may have some reason to believe it is the sort of thing
they made--but we could easily be wrong. After all, none of us has actually
lived in the Middle Ages and spent a lifetime eating medieval food. If I am
making something not based on a period recipe, how can I know with any
certainty that it is consistent with the restrictions of the cooking styles
of that particular period and place? Perhaps the reason I could not find a
corresponding medieval recipe was the existence of a "restriction" in the
cooking style that I didn't know about.

A different question would be "is it worth trying to make up our own
"period" recipes." On the whole, my inclination is against it. There are
thousands of pages of surviving period recipes, many of which nobody has
made in recent centuries. We are likely to learn much more from trying to
work from those recipes than by making up our own. Indeed, I don't see how
one could have any plausible idea of what is or is not a medieval recipe
save by having worked through a very large number of real ones.

My view of the matter is in part a result of the observation that most
people in the SCA who present what they consider to be original period
recipes have not done much cooking from the original sources, and are
simply taking modern recipes that feel medieval to a twentieth century
American. In principle one could do much better than that, of course--but
the people who could tend to be the ones who are cooking from period
sources instead.

David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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