OT - Re: SC - Ras and his 400 disks

[Phil & Susan Troy]

At 8:49 AM -0700 10/22/98, Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:

>> 2. I would expect your 1/4 c of salt pork or suet to weigh a little over
>2
>> ounces. So the ratio of suet to meat in your recipe is close to 1:8,
>> instead of the 1:1 that Digby specifies in his first recipe (the second
>> doesn't say). That's a pretty extreme change--why did you make it?

>Since one recipe said one to one, and the other didnt give any porportion
>at all, we felt we could do as we saw fit.

I don't think that follows. If one recipe said 1:1 and the other said 1:8,
I would agree--but failure to state any ratio doesn't imply that all ratios
work, and the existence of specific proportions in the other version does
imply that those proportions work.

If you get two phone calls from a friend, in one of which he leaves his
number and the other he doesn't leave his number, do you conclude that you
can call him back by dialing at random? A somewhat more extreme case, but
the same principle.

>> 3. Digby uses 2 or 3 egg yolks and one egg white; your recipe has 3 eggs
>> and one egg white; why the change?
>>
>Purely for finanical reasons. Again, when we did it "right" it didnt seem
>very different than when we did it the cheap way, ie not ending up with a
>gajillion extra whites (as it was, the lone egg white was from another of
>the myriad recipes that called for egg yolks solely). Our eco-groovey
>recycle till you die crew was very upset at the idea of throwing away
>dozens of eggs worth of whites (and no one was willing to freeze them all).

That's why Cryspes were invented. And Hulwa. And ...   .

Gunthar writes (re the suet ratio):

>I agree with AM here. Reading both recipes I can see how combining the earlier
>and later recipes to fit the taste would still be true to the dish.

But you aren't "combining" the earlier and later recipes. The later recipe
doesn't say that you are supposed to use a ratio of 1:8--it just omits that
information. The available evidence is  consistent with the possibility
that Digby used a ratio of 1:1 in both recipes. We know that is what he did
for one version, and we don't know what he did for the other.

I think our disagreement here involves more than quibbling over the details
of interpretation. Consider two different approaches to period cooking:

1. The objective is to to produce something as close as possible to what a
period cook would have produced. From that standpoint, the more information
you have about the dish, the better--because more information allows you to
narrow down the set of possible ways the dish might have been made, making
it more likely that what you are making is what they made. That applies  to
using the information contained (for the first recipe) in the title of the
dish and the first version of how to cook it, and it also applies to the
information on the meat/suet ratio contained in one of the two variants of
the Digby recipe.

2. The objective is to produce a plausible argument to show that the dish
you want to make is period. From that standpoint, the less information you
have the better--because the vaguer the recipe, the more likely it is that
you can interpret it as describing what you want to make.

Obviously, AnneMarie, Eduardo, and Gunthar are not arguing for and (I
presume) do not believe in the second approach. But I think the way in
which they look at the recipe is affected by an SCA culture in which the
second, not the first, is the norm--what is usually meant by "documenting"
a recipe.

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


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