SC - Substitution vs Accuracy

[david friedman]

Note: This response is by Cariadoc; Elizabeth, who posts from the same
email address, has already given hers.
- ----

At 2:09 PM +0000 2/25/99, Oughton, Karin (GEIS, Tirlan) wrote:

>I'm interested to know - do you have to follow the letter of an authentic
>period recipe?

No.

>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.

But you are a 20th c. American (or wherever you are from), and have
probably lived your entire life surrounded by that cuisine. So you know
which ingredients can substitute for which. You wouldn't just substitute
any ingredient that happened to be available--replacing sugar with salt in
a recipe for cookies, for example, has rather drastic effects.

When we are doing period cooking, we don't have the option of first growing
up eating period food cooked by period cooks. We are trying to reconstruct
a dead cusine from written records. If we feel free to substitute whatever
seems appropriate to our 20th century tastes any time we think doing so
would be an improvement, we are going to shift what we produce away from
period tastes and towards modern tastes, thus reducing the amount that we
(and the people who eat what we cook) learn about period cooking. So many
of us follow a policy of sticking as close to the original recipe as
possible, subject to constraints of cost, availability, and the like.

Hope that answers your questions.


>
>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?
>
>Feel free to point me towards articles already written about this!
>
>ta,
>
>Karin.
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

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


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