SC - Goat roast help requested

[Alderton, Philippa]

At 8:22 PM -0600 4/20/99, Wendy wrote:
>Thank you to those who replied to my note.  I think I will simply remove the
>cayenne next time unless someone can advise a substitute (the recipe already
>calls for black pepper - add more?).  As for the lemons, they are extremely
>important as they make the skin crispy.  I can have them if I'm rich, right?

That way of putting it makes it sound as though you are asking about some
set of rules of what you may or may not do. No such rules exist, since the
SCA doesn't enforce authenticity beyond a very minimal level. The relevant
questions are whether you have any good reason to believe the recipe is a
period one and how much you care whether it is.

You are starting with a recipe which you got from a modern source and which
you know is not medieval, since it contains a new world ingredient (cayenne
pepper). While it is conceivable that someone took a medieval recipe,
modified it, and published it in a modern publication without mentioning
the source, it is very unlikely. If you modify the recipe by removing the
one ingredient you know is out of period, you still have no reason to think
it is a medieval recipe--no more than if you had simply invented the recipe
yourself, making sure to use no new world ingredients.

It is true that once you remove the cayenne you can't prove that the recipe
isn't medieval European. In precisely the same sense you can't prove it
isn't a modern Chinese recipe, or Japanese recipe, or Indian recipe, since
all of those cultures have access to the ingredients. I doubt, however,
that if you were serving it to friends you would introduce it as a Japanese
dish you particular enjoyed. There is no more reason to assume that
anything that can be made with ingredients available in England in the 15th
century is a 15th century English dish than that anything that could be
made with ingredients available in Japan is a Japanese dish.

So the answer is that you can have the lemons whether you are rich or poor.
But you cannot, rich or poor, truthfully describe the dish as period unless
you  have reason to believe that it is--and so far as I can tell by your
post, you don't.

If you want to cook the dish because you like it, by all means do so--and
don't worry about the cayenne. If you want to cook period dishes, start by
looking in a period cookbook, of which a large number are available,
including several on the web, find a recipe you think sounds good, and make
it.

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".

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