SC - Vegetarian Chicken Stock

[Kiriel & Chris]

At 10:35 AM -0400 5/4/98, Michael Macchione wrote:

>In period, I would suspect that less than 1% of all recipes were ever
>written down.  A lot of standards like bread weren't written down,

There are period bread recipes.

> and
>some cultures just didn't write any recipes down (the Irish are a good
>example).  And just how much do we know about what the peasants ate on a
>regular basis?

I think that whether your suspicion is plausible depends on what cuisine
you are talking about. For the 14th-15th c. upper class English French
cuisine (probably the  back a century or two farther as well), we have lots
of different sources. The recipes show substantial overlap from distant
sources (including Chiquart, who says he has never seen a cookbook), which
suggests that we have a sizable fraction of all of them. For that cuisine,
I think it is reasonable to suppose that if something wasn't written down,
and nothing reasonably similar was written down, the odds are that it was
rarely or never done.

On the other hand, there are quite a lot of period cultures for which we
have no surviving recipes at all--so the figure is zero %. And, as you
suggest, our information is better for the upper classes than for the
peasants.

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


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