SC - Hollandaise sauce - Recipe - OOP

[Korrin S DaArdain]

Ras wrote:
...
>There is some supporting argument to the fact that a person can't possibly get
>a feel for the cooking style they are trying to emulate if they aren't
>familiar with that style through practice with existing recipes.
>
>Although you, myself, and several others on this list may be 'instinctive'
>cooks or have a broad enough background in cookery to  'wing it', there are
>many who don't have a clue as to what is exceptable period-like
>combinations...

Quite a lot of us are "instinctive" cooks.  In a way, that is part of the
problem.  I, for example, if throwing dinner together out of what happens
to be in the pantry, use soy sauce in a way which neither of my
grandmothers would have, let alone my ancesters 400+ years ago--and that is
just one of the more blatent ways in which my cooking instincts are not
period ones. We get a feel for modern American cooking by living on it as
cooked by authentic 20th-century Americans; we do not have the option of
getting a feel for 15th-century English cooking that way. To my mind, you
start by doing your absolute best to recreate a recipe as written; this may
include using parallel recipes to make sense of the one you are working
from, but I think that mixing recipes as your basic procedure gets you
farther from the original rather than closer.

In our cooking workshops, working out recipes we haven't tried before, we
insist that everyone measure everything, weigh everything, time everything,
and write down everything. We have a hard time getting experienced cooks to
stick to this. We don't do it because we believe that period cooks would
have done so, but because we feel that that is how, with our different
cooking insticnts, we can come as close as possible to reproducing period
cookery.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook


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