SC - Greetings and Chicken

[david friedman]

At 6:05 PM -0600 4/21/99, Wendy wrote:
>david friedman wrote:
>
>>  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.
>>
>
>I simply want to make sure that the recipe *could* be period.  That some cook
>somewhere (who never bothered to write it down for the future) could have
>made it
>in Europe in the Middle Ages.

I think the example of modern ethnic cuisines shows why this way of
thinking about the question--very common in the SCA--doesn't  work. Do you
think it would make sense to say that your recipe "could be" Indian? So far
as ingredients are concerned it could--but I suspect anyone familiar with
modern Indian cooking could say, with some confidence, that it wasn't an
Indian recipe (if I'm wrong about Indian, substitute Chinese, or Japanese,
or Ethiopian). A cuisine isn't simply defined by ingredients. If you turned
a modern Chinese cook loose in an American supermarket, she would still
produce a Chinese meal. If you turned a French cook loose in a Chinese
market, he would still produce a French meal.

Consider applying the same approach to SCA garb. I am currently wearing
conventional modern clothes. Suppose they all happen to be made of cotton.
Does it follow that what I am wearing "could be" period garb, and is
therefore appropriate clothing for an SCA event? How about bluejeans made
from (period) cotton denim, dyed with (period) indigo, with (period) brass
buttons? Combine them with a cotton T-shirt. It is logically possible that
someone, sometime in period wore clothes just like that and no record has
survived--but it isn't terribly likely, and I don't see the point of
describing them as garb that "could be" period.

If we didn't have any period cookbooks, it might make sense to treat
recipes that had only period ingredients as the closest we could come to
period recipes. But we have thousands of pages of surviving period recipes.
If you aren't concerned about whether the recipe is period, there is no
need to omit the cayenne. If you are, why cook something that "could
conceivably be period, but we have no reason to think it is" when you have
the option of cooking a period recipe instead?

In another post, responding to someone else on the same topic, she wrote:

>So basically what you are saying is that unless someone wrote it down in
>the exact form
>that you prepare you don't bother.

The argument is not "if you can't do something perfectly, don't do it at
all"--that is the error I like to refer to as making the best the enemy of
the good. It is rather "if you don't have any substantial reason to believe
something is true, don't say it is true." If the way you have gotten a
recipe is by taking a modern recipe and eliminating the one New World
ingredient, you have no substantial reason to believe it is now a period
recipe.

>Is all your garb (oh, sorry, not a
>medievil term) clothing made from period fabrics?

Yes, if "period fabric" means "period fibers." No, if it means period
fibers spun and woven by hand.

>Does recreation have to be so strict?  One of the
>things I like(d) about the SCA was the fact that people could do things
>however they
>felt was appropriate for them.

And as I said in my earlier post (and I suspect Laura agrees, but she can
speak for herself), you "can" do things however you wish, short of spending
the whole event in T-shirt and blue jeans. Authenticity in the SCA is
optional, something you do because you want to, save at a very low level.
The argument is not over what you can do but whether if you do something it
is accurate to describe it as period.

>I don't like being told that adapting a modern recipe
>to a medievil style is not "recreation".

You haven't adapted it to a medieval style--you have simply eliminated one
ingredient. If I was wearing a cotton shirt, cotton pants, a silk sports
jacket and a polyester tie, would removing the tie amount to "adapting my
garb to a medieval style?" I've removed the only out of period ingredient.

In order to adapt it to a medieval style, you have to actually look through
medieval cookbooks to find out how they cooked chicken. And if you are
going to do that, it makes more sense to look until you find a recipe you
like instead of looking until you find a recipe that is very close to this
one--or until, after going through all available sources, you conclude that
there aren't any.

>The basic fundamentals are there.  Roasting
>chicken with herbs is, as far as I know, period.

Maybe--do you have any examples of period recipes that do that? If so, what
herbs do they use? Do they use lemon juice or something else?

>If not, please tell me that.

You seem to be arguing that any way of preparing food that was physically
possible in period is presumptively period, whether or not we have any
evidence that it was, and that the presumption remains until someone
somehow proves that it isn't.

>But
>don't tell me that what I am doing is not recreation.  It may not be your
>way, but it
>is not wrong.

It isn't  wrong to cook the recipe. But it is incorrect to describe it as a
period recipe when you have no reason to believe it is. It is incorrect to
say you are "recreating medieval cooking" when you aren't.

Going back to my earlier example of ethnic cooking...  .You are making the
chicken. Someone asks you what you are doing. You answer "I am recreating
an Indian dish." Would you say that? Surely not--because it isn't true. So
why describe what you are doing as recreating a medieval dish? If Indian
cooking consists of a small subset of all the things that could be done
with those ingredients, isn't it reasonable to suppose that medieval
cooking does too?

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


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