SC - changing recipes

[david friedman]

At 8:02 PM -0500 3/12/99, Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:
>I would like to put out a question for discussion:
>
>I have been spending time looking at medieval recipes.  Due to health concerns
>so much of the composition of the recipes would "kill" me if I cooked it as
>stated in the recipe.

This may be true of some recipes out there--but there are thousands of
pages of surviving medieval cookbooks. Why not just pick those recipes that
are consistent with whatever your health constraints are? One further
advantage is that doing that would push you into looking at particular
sorts of recipes, which might be well be ones that other people hadn't
already done.

>Sooooo, I have started making replacements of food
>stuffs and changing cooking methods to suit my personal needs.  ie:
>instead of fyring in oil, I "fry" using 1 tsp of oil in 1 C of water in a very
>hot pan
>instead of 8 eggs, I use egg replacer
>instead of milk  I use rice milk or soy
>etc.....you get the idea.
>My question is:  At what point does the recipe stop being "the recipe;?

I don't think that is a meaningful question--"being the recipe" isn't a
yes/no matter but a matter of degree.

>My question is:  If one cannot be a purist (sp?) about thier medieval food,
>isn't getting "a taste" of or "feel for" the *idea* of the recipe better than
>nothing at all?

The problem is that the more you alter things, the more likely it is that
what you are getting a taste of is not medieval cooking but your cooking.

Note also that, since medieval recipes usually contain no quantities, there
is a considerable range over which you are simply making your preferred
guess. Thus your "instead of eight eggs" implies that the original recipe
specified eight eggs--but it probably didn't. If one egg replacer will
work, that is evidence that one egg will work, which makes it plausible
that one egg was what the original used.

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


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