SC - RE - OLE Online trouble - OOP

[Christina Nevin]

At 10:44 PM -0700 5/12/99, redbear wrote:
>The problem with recreating the middle  ages and the varying aspects
>thereof is that it was not a highly literate  society and much of what was
>written down is no longer extant. This is  especially true of cooking,
>often an oral tradition. If we randomly create  recipes, we are not
>recreating the middle ages. However, if we only use extant  recipes, we
>are not recreating the middle ages, as so much has ben  lost.

I am not sure I follow that. Suppose, to take a low estimate, we have ten
thousand surviving period recipes. If we use only those recipes, we won't
recreate all of period cooking--but then, unless there are an awful lot of
us cooking an awful lot of feasts, we wouldn't be recreating all of it even
if we did have every recipe ever used.

Why do you think we come closer to recreating the middle ages if we cook
(say) 100 recipes from surviving cookbooks and 200 more that we have
invented, attempting to make them as period as possible, than we would if
we cooked 300 recipes from surviving cookbooks? Neither approach gives us
every dish that was ever cooked, but the latter approach gives us about 200
more than the former--a little less if some of a few our guesses are
entirely accurate ones.

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


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