SC - Removes or courses?

[Tollhase1@aol.com]

Anya wrote on the original subject of Lefse/hleifr:

>for those intrested, there is a copy of the Domostroi in english now, and
>lists alt, rye, wheat and oats as grains avaliable in the time of Ivan the
>Terrible. Granted that's right at the end of period, but considering that
>it's Russian it's probably a bit behind the times.
<snip>
>It also has chapters on feast foods, and two chapters of "recipies" on
>drinks and maily veggie dishes.

I just want to caution people on using the English translation of the
Domostroi for Russian food research.

First:  
The Domostroi is a great research aid, but the text underwent several
changes in its history.  The sections with recipes (chapters 64:2 through
66) are not period and may be of a _foreign_ origin, as Pouncy points out
in her introduction.  She says that they were added on sometime between
1600 and 1625.  The wedding section (chapter 67) and its menus do not
appear until after the addition of the recipes sections, again out of
SCA-period.  Now, I _am_ an advocate for making the cut-off date for
SCA-period Russia sometime in the mid-17th cen (pre-Peter the Great), but
the recipes sections should be used with recognition of their OOP-ness (as
Anya did).

Second:
While looking at Russian-language versions of the Domostroi, I have
discovered that Pouncy mistranslated and/or needlessly translated several
costume and food terms.  I feel that she should have left all the
"difficult" words untranslated or at least provide the original, (which she
did do for some terms).  For example, she calls a "dushegreya" a blouse,
something that it definitely is NOT (visit the Slavic Interest Group if you
want to find out what it really is).

I have been working on re-redacting the recipe "Russian Cabbage or Greens"
(found at http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Medieval/Recipes_Done.html), in which
Pouncy translates "smetanka" as cream, when it could actually be any number
of foods (I tried to find my redaction notes, but they are under my Pennsic
and school stuff at the moment, sorry) including sour cream (which would be
nice since we don't have any evidence of sour cream in SCA-period Russia).
It is kind of fun to read it in Russian, it has the same feel as medieval
European recipes.

The gist of my tirade is that I do not fully trust the English translation
of the Domostroi (at least on my two pet subjects of clothing and food) and
I am mostly relying on it as a guide to help me quickly find references in
the Russian text.  Now, I am not fluent in Russian and I am _definitely_
not a scholar at the level that Pouncy is and her translation was a _great_
addition to the relatively few medieval Russian sources in English that we
have.  But unfortunately for us Pouncy did not do her translation with
historical reenactment in mind (my husband spoke to her on the subject at a
conference they both attended).

While I'm at it Anya, why don't you come on over and join us at the Slavic
Interest Group?  We could always use another cook for the Russian wedding
project (hint, hint).
*************************************************************************
Ilyana Barsova (Yana)  jdmiller2 at students.wisc.edu
http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~jdmiller2 
Slavic Interest Group http://www.uwplatt.edu/~goldschp/slavic.html
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