SC - My try at Roman Roast

[Stefan li Rous]

At 11:03 AM +0800 2/1/99, Matthew Legge wrote:
>Hello All,
>
>The following is probably well known to all the good gentles on this list,
>but at a recent feast it was really brought home to me that many of the
>period dishes were not very subtle in their use of salt and spices.

How do you know? Period recipes almost never include quantities, so what
you are reacting to are the guesses of the modern people who cooked those
dishes, or the guesses of the modern people who wrote the recipes the cooks
were working from, not the period recipes themselves.

>Last weekend, the Barony of Aneala had its Mid-summer feast. Members of my
>household - with a lot of help from some generous others - were each asked
>to prepare enough of one dish for the revellers at the feast. Mine was a
>friends tart - a sort of very cheesy/egg tart. Each tart had a quarter
>teaspoon of powdered ginger, an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg and a pinch
>a saffron for flavouring (together with 3/4 cup of cream or other soft
>cheese, a cup of grated swiss cheese and two eggs - all measurements are
>metric).

Where did you get the recipe, and why do you think the quantities you
describe have anything to do with how the recipe was actually made in
period?

>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? The
>other way of thinking of this might be to ask whether the recipies that
>survived for us to read and interpret were the "special" ones, with the
>others being so routine that the cooks of the time did not think it was
>necessary to commit them to paper?

Unfortunately, you are speculating on the basis of a false assumption.
Either the people who provided you with the recipes misled you by implying
that the quantities were in the originals, or the originals were out of
period (or possibly very late period), or they were themselves misled, or
you misunderstood them--assumed they were giving you period recipes when
they were giving you either modern recipes or modern redactions of period
recipes, with quantities added.

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


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