SC - Quantities of salt and spices used.
Bonne of Traquair
oftraquair at hotmail.com
Mon Feb 1 07:15:06 PST 1999
><< What I would like to clear up is whether this heavy use of
flavourings was
> an every day occurrance or if it was just to impress visitors/guests?
>>
>
>I would say it was more likely the result of someone who doesn't have a
clue
>about cooking mistakenly preparing what they thought medieval food was
like.
When I am making a period recipe for the first time, I add about half of
the spices in order to account for the original redactor perhaps having
the spoiled food must be spiced heavily prejudice, or their spices
weren't as fresh as mine. Even if the original recipe uses vocabulary
that makes me think they mean a lot of spice, often enough there isn't
equivalent description of how much food the spice is meant to flavor, so
a lot still remains undefined.
I want the set of dishes in my feast to be subtly different from the
same basic ingredients cooked in a moden menu, but I don't want the
taste so drastically different from modern food that people pronounce it
icky. So I go with half the spices and then scale it up, and sometimes
down. Since no quantities are given in originals, I feel pretty
comfortable in redefining the spices to fit my tastes, that's what the
original redactor did anyway. I'm only just getting comfortable with
the idea of working from an original--mostly I've worked with others
redactions, or with a combination of the original and redaction.
Bonne
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