SC - McMuffins, was:sca-cooks V1 #1409, was allergies

[Philip & Susan Troy]

>I have been listening to the recent discourse onperiod recipes and 
what is "period" cooking, and I feel compelled to add in a half-penny's 
worth of opinion. 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.
 
Hello Branwen :-)

I see both sides of this argument.  What we currently have available is, 
I'm sure, only a fraction of what was done in the Middle Ages; that 
fraction which someone was able to write down for posterity and that we 
have subsequently inherited.  However, as has been pointed out, if we 
choose to vary the facts of a documented period recipe, we are veering 
off into the worlds of supposition and assumption, and are actually 
creating a "new" variation of the recipe in question.  

Similarly, a Bard writing today cannot help but compose a "new" poem 
albeit that he uses a Middle Ages literary format and chooses to write 
in a medieval language.

Neither of these things, the new recipe or the new poem, would be 
authentically period.  I think authenticity is the key word we're 
looking at here.

Elysant
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