SC - Buckwheat-sca-cooks V1 #645

[Anne M. Young]

On Mon, 16 Mar 1998 09:22:08 EST, LrdRas wrote:

>IMO, the best renditions of period recipes are created by simply following the
>directions and using the foodstuffs indicated in the original.In cases where a
>particular cook may not have the necessary equipment or access to the
>ingredients needed, it is simply a case of choosing a recipe from those
>available that you do have equipment/ingredients available for. That being a
>far better course than altering a recipe beyongd recognition to acommodate for
>the lack of proper tools. Certainly, viewing a gas burner or a electric
>heating element or oven as heat sources is valid but substituting corn starch
>for rice flour, IMHO, would not be valid.

I prefer to use a redacted recipe, from a book or other source that
includes the original - and check the redaction to make sure it is
reasonably likely.  At least with a redacted recipe someone else has done
the work of testing proportions, cooking times, etc. for you - which is
very useful if you have to prepare the dish for 70 people :)

Mind you, you do have to watch it - the differences can be fairly extreme.
Also the original often has extra information not found in the redaction
(like alternative ingredients).

>The point is that if the redacted recipe bears little or no resemblance to the
>original, then most likely the fault lies with the redaction and not in the
>original recipe.

With this I tend to agree - though sometimes original ingredients or
techniques just aren't available, and a substitute has to be used.  But I
would always prefer to see the original, so I can make my own judgement -
for instance, correcting redactions that assume you can't get hold of
verjuice :)

- -Korny
- -- 
William Bekwith MKA Kornelis Sietsma | http://zikzak.net/~korny
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