cloved fruit (was: SC - Period Wedding)

[Mordonna22@aol.com]

At 9:29 PM -0500 10/23/98, Helen wrote:
>Ras wrote:
>(I don't think that combining 12 pasta salad recipes would produce
>anything other than another pasta recipe at best and a mess at worst),
>the resulting recipe from combining 2 period recipes could only be
>called period-like and not period, IMO.
>
>I am sorry I beg to differ:
>
>In normal everyday cooking, I always consult a lot of recipes to make
>any dish I have never made before. I then do what I like after I get a
>feel for the dish by research.
>	 But, if I cook something my Mom taught me, I do it by feel. I feel
>different one day to the next.  The dish is always good but not EXACTLY
>the same.
>	I can not believe the same would not have been true in a time when
>recipes were almost never measured or written down.

I don't think anyone is denying that--after all, we have multiple recipes
for the same dish from different sources, and they are not always
identical. The point is that if you follow a period recipe as exactly as
possible, you have reason to believe that what you are making is one of the
ways it was done in period. If you try to create your own "period" dish
from several recipes, you have less reason to believe that what you are
doing is one of the ways it was done in period, since you don't know what
are the ways in which period cooks would have varied the recipe.

Note also, that even if you follow the original recipe exactly, the dish
need not come out exactly the same, since most period recipes omit
unnecessary details such as quanitities, temperatures, and times.

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


============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================