SC -Gentle education, was Help thinking up a class...

[Gedney, Jeff]

On Sunday, May 03, 1998 9:41 AM, Seton1355 [SMTP:Seton1355 at aol.com]
wrote:
> In a message dated 5/3/98 5:53:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
acrouss at gte.net
> writes:
> 
> << beef stew with carrots and turnips
>  >  >>
> What is wrong (medievally speaking) with stewed beef with ground
vegetables?
> Surely this is such a simple, ubiquitous dish, that it was made on
meat eating
> days.
> Phillipa Seton

This is a common misconception in documentation practices.

It may well have been a ubiquitous dish, and simple to prepare. but
documentation is not about "what might have been..." or "it seems
obvious/logical that...", it is concerned only with what IS.
While some author or other may say that this type of dish is widely
prevalent, the problem is that without a specific period and
contemporary recipe, we cannot say with certainty, that beef stew was
cooked in "period". Any extrapolation of evidence (such as that saying
that certain kinds of related food were cooked), without an actual
recipe or precise description (like "on St. Boef du Boign's day, King
Muckymug did feast upon a pottage of beef, carrots, turnips and leeks"
or "compelled of the villeins, for the Duc's table, one fatted cow, and
50 baskets each of carrots and turnips, and the all leeks within the
village for the making of a stewed pottage of beef, a favorite dish"),
any such extrapolation is just an assumption, and may be incorrect. 
For the purposes of the SCA, we try to maintain a standard of
"documentation" that requires little or no doubt in interpretation.  The
farther removed a piece of documentation is from a firm and
unquestionable contemporary recipe or description, the less it is
valuable as proof for our purposes. 

You do not have to keep to the standard, if you are cooking just for
yourself or house, or even an event, though.
But you cannot properly call it a period feast, and it will not stand up
to better researched competition in contests.
 
This kind of mushy documentation is related to and often is derived from
the trying to document a favorite food, that you plan to serve in
advance. That is a very slippery slope. while it is possible to find
good documentation this way, one must be careful how one goes about it.
This kind of research requires a little extra care.  It is not uncommon
to have people say things like  "I can trace this meal back to the end
of the 17th century, it probably existed for some time before being
written down, so it is probably period...", or " they made something
like Dried Horse Meat in 8th century Mongolia, so I can eat my beef
jerky without worrying about it", or "this book says that they ate dried
beef, so I'll just put out a dish of (teriaki) beef jerky, that I got
such a deal on..."

I have seen documentation attempting to justify everything from
mayonnaise to Linoleum prints, to stainless steel. ("Japanese Iron from
Izuzu Prefecture has trace elements of molybdenum and cobalt, and if it
is well worked into steel it can be chemically similar to 44
stainless...")

I think that any documentation that has the words "might have been", or
"could be", needs lots of supporting material, as a general rule.

Brandu 


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