SC - OT OOP character and font questions

[redbear]

At 2:09 PM +0000 2/25/99, Oughton, Karin (GEIS, Tirlan) wrote:
...
>I am not 'SCA' per se so I am not a 100% au fait with the rules about
>accuracy to historical records. However I've noticed on a lot of occasions
>comments in posts along the lines of 'period' 'not period' 'period-ish'....

>I'm interested to know - do you have to follow the letter of an authentic
>period recipe?  I rarely completely follow a modern recipe, and will often
>substitute ingredients; and in my thought process, substitution of one
>ingredient that was available in the same area/period for another does not
>make a recipe non-period.
>
>I guess that I see a series of gradation ;
>
>	- accurate to the letter of a manuscript - 'authentic documented
>recipe'
>	- accurate to the ingredients of the period and cooking prep &
>techniques, using an authentic recipe as a base - 'period derived recipe'
>	- accurate ingredients, recipes & techniques based on modern cookery
>- 'period-influenced recipe'
>	- modern - modern
>
>I would have assumed the first two would be acceptable. Is this incorrect?
>
The SCA has no strict rules about what you have to do or what is acceptable
for use in the SCA. If you want to go to a full-dress event (as opposed to
a local meeting or workshop) you must wear "an attempt at pre-17th c.
clothing", and that is about as far as the rules go. I've seen modern
chocolate cakes served at SCA feasts and praised by the Powers That Be.

But forgetting SCA rules, and thinking about what makes a recipe period...
The ideal, as I see it, is to make something which Chiquart or Platina
would recognize and approve: to make a dish the way they would have made
and liked it. This is an ideal not only hard to achieve but hard to tell if
you have achieved; I can't summon up Chiquart to ask, "Is this it, sir? Did
I do it right?" I therefore prefer to come as close as I can to the
original recipe, not substituting where I can help doing so, in the hope of
finding out something of what period food tasted like. I'm going to have to
make enough guesses and assumptions simply in cooking the recipe as given,
some of which guesses are bound to be wrong, that I don't want to add any
more changes. I am sure period cooks would have made changes and
substitutions according to their circumstances, but not being a period
cook, I don't know which changes would have seemed natural to them--or at
least, figuring out what a 15th-c. cook would have substituted for verjuice
when he had run out is a non-trivial problem, involving a lot of comparing
recipes and cookbooks.

As you say, there is a gradation. If I am cooking a feast for an SCA event,
I aim at the top of your gradation. However, there are constraints that
limit just how authentic I am willing to be on any given occasion. I have
never cooked in a 15th-c. kitchen; I've seen one, so I know more or less
what I ought to have, but I don't own one, and I don't usually have the
necessary staff to run one. The carrots and cabbage (and, usually, the
apples) I use are modern strains, different in some degree from their
period equivalents. I could get free-range chickens, but I don't, because I
want to keep down the expense--and I am sure that changes the taste of my
bruets. And my recipes and menus used to be a lot less authentic than they
are now, because I have learned something over the years.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook






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

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".

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