SC - Turkish Breakfast - Suggestions Anyone?

[ana l. valdes]

On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, ana l. valdes wrote:

<snip>
> As I wrote
> before, several dishes and fooduses are not "dogmatical truths", without
> discussion topics between different scholar traditions. I am, par
> example, reading now "The Food in Middle Ages", edited by Melitta Weiss
> Adamson, and she and other point out what difficult to find "facts"
> about the evolution of certain dishes.

I think that there are some differences between 'dogmatical truths' (a
term that I am very uncomfortable with) and 'facts' about food. A 'fact'
might be something simple- we know for a 'fact' that tomatoes were not
present in Western Europe before 1492, because they are a New World
species. A 'dogmatical truth', if I understand your meaning, might be that
they were not in use in the kitchen until well into the 16th century,
because the first mention in a cookbook is 1544, I believe. This does not
mean that they weren't in use in the intervening 52 years, but that we
cannot prove their use as food, for lack of earlier evidence.  
	Adamson, BTW, is an interesting read, but I would not rely on her
for accuracy.

> Bad translations, the distruction of orginal manuscripts, inepts
> copysts, a lot of different explanaitions about the lacking "scientific"
> accuracy.

You can say that about anything before the age of computers and
photographic evidence- and still we know that those can be manipulated
also. The 'bad translations/bad copies/missing evidence' litany is
prevalent in any field of inquiry. I do hats and headdresses form
14th-15th c. France and England. There are none of them in museums- I have
to go by what I can surmise from paintings, statuary, tomb brasses, etc.
All of these can be subject the the whim of the artist, the mood or
attitude of the photographer, even of the editor who crops a photo and
puts it in a book. But when I look at evidence, I assume that A) what I
have is incomplete, B) lack of evidence done does necessarily mean that
there is none- perhaps only that I have not found it, and C) lack of
evidence does not mean that there is any to be found- it may mean that I
am looking at all there is. I cannot say that a headdress is traditional,
therefore it probably existed in the 14th century also, and I just haven't
found the evidence because they were too difficult to carve on the tomb
brasses, or whatever. Well, I _could_ say it, but I would be wrong.
	Another example closer to the 'missing evidence' idea- I wrote a
paper a couple of years ago on Isabella of France, the queen of Edward II
of England. Most references to her in modern books call her the 'She-Wolf
of France'. I was interested in this and the origins and started digging.
Would you believe that I can find not evidence that she was called by that
name in her own day? The earliest evidence I could find was in Christopher
Marlowe's play _Edward II_! All of the chronicles (English, Latin, French)
called her La Belle Isabelle or Isabel the Fair, and after she deposed her
husband (long story) they say nasty things about her, but never the
She-Wolf epithet. This does not mean that she was not called that, but
that it was not publicly recorded until Marlowe wrote it down. This is a
far cry from the various historians saying she is 'traditionally' known as
the She-Wolf...

Tradition and evidence are very different. Use them both as tools, not as
masters, and you will be much happier about your work.

'Lainie
- -
Laura C. Minnick
- -
'A Vaillans Coeurs Riens Impossible'
- -
"Libraries have been the death of many great men, particularly the
Bodleian."
	Humfrey Wanley, c. 1731




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