SC - OOP - Strange lunch experience

[Laura C Minnick]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> At 1:16 PM -0400 5/21/99, LordVoldai at aol.com wrote:
> >as far as i know the dolmas and both spreads are period.  

<snip>

> What evidence do you have for any of the three? Where do they appear in a
> period cookbook?
> 
> David/Cariadoc

Would you believe...it's all in your point of view? That if you haven't
seen any concrete evidence that they're _not_ period, we should assume
they are?

Nah, I didn't think so. Just a shot. Hey, the gentleman did say "as far
as I know"... .

Lord Voldai, I'm more or less with His Grace on this question, for this
reason: among modern (or close to modern) foods that might have existed
in period, we have things like stuffed, roast chicken, hamhocks and
greens, blood sausages, meat pies, and a buncha other foods that are
clearly depicted in period sources, either in recipes, real or fictional
menus, illuminations, etc.  Now we know dolmades and the two spreads you
mention exist today, but we don't really have anything to tell us when
they first appeared (or at least if we do, neither His Grace nor I am
aware of it). Hey, I think we'd both be rather pleased to be shown wrong
about this.
 
On a tangential note, I remember reading in Elisabeth Luard's "The Old
World Kitchen" (one of my favorite cookbooks, BTW) that the possibility
exists that there is some kind of link between certain Scandinavian and
Turkish foods. Luard writes of King Charles XII of Sweden, who, after an
unsuccessful campaign against Peter the Great, departed without his army
(they being dead and all) for sunny Turkey, where he spent five years
living in a style he was accustomed to but couldn't afford, trying to
get the Sultan to raise an army for him to fight round two with Peter
the Great. Upon his return to Sweden, she says, his retinue had grown by
several hundred merchants who had big enough tabs on Charles to follow
him to Sweden in hopes of collecting their cash. And, it seems, they
brought their cooks, who had to learn to deal with the locally available foods.

Certainly there are dishes in Sweden suspiciously like lavosh and
dolmades (lefse and kaldomar, respectively). Still, I'm not sure I buy
the idea.

This would be the turn of the eighteenth century, of course, and doesn't
address the question of the age of these dishes in Turkey, but I did
think it was interesting in light of this topic of discussion.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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