SC - "personal recipies"

[david friedman]

At 1:11 PM -0400 5/12/99, LordVoldai at aol.com wrote:
>Donning a flame retardent suit Voldai quotes:
>
>In a message dated 5/12/99 1:31:24 AM Central Daylight Time, LrdRas at aol.com
>writes:
>
>> Once the recipe has changed from the original even a single iota it is
>>  no longer able to be called 'period'. It is a personal recipe. And, I can
>>  think of no excuse which is valid for doing so other than laziness on the
>>  part of the Kitchen Steward,.
>
>and replies:
>	while i am all for research into period cookery i find it insulting
>and _excessively_ compulsive (i'm all for being moderately ccompulsive) to
>insist that a recipe cannot be changed one iota.  redactions may inherently
>and sometimes intentionally include substitutions or alterations from the
>original recipe.  ofttimes this is not laziness, but rather, ecpediency or
>creativity (the alternate interpretation for the "c" in SCA).

I would distinguish between those two cases. I don't see anything wrong
with substituting a modern ingredient for a period ingredient you can't
get, assuming the former is your best guess at something like the latter.
The obvious example is the use of new world squash instead of oldworld
squash. Obviously, it is better if you can get the old world squash, but
some people may not be able to, or may not have the necessary information.

But I have considerable reservations about the idea that one should change
recipes in order to be "creative." The problem is that we are all 20th
century cooks. So when we alter a period recipe in a way that seems
appropriate to us, we are quite likely to be changing it towards modern
ideas of what food should be like and away from period ideas, thus making
it a less accurate rendition of period cooking--and, potentially,
misleading people as to what period cooking was like.

>	 i also feel that it is insulting to our bretheren in peroid to
>assume that they were mindless automatons following instructions in a book of
>cookery and had no creative spirit or ability themselves.

Nobody asserts that. To begin with, period recipes aren't sufficiently
detailed to be of any use to mindless automatons--interpretation within the
constraints of the original text requires judgement and "creativity."
Beyond that, the question is not whether period cooks altered the written
recipes, but whether they altered them in the same way we would.

Suppose there are three versions of recipe X that were made in period:

X1: The version written down.
X2, X3: The variants some period cooks made but didn't write down.

If we follow the original recipe, we are doing the best we can to duplicate
X1, a period recipe. We can't do the same for X2 and X3 because nobody
wrote them down. If we do our own variant, the result is Y2--which we have
less reason to believe is period than an accurate rendition of X1.

>i'm sure period
>cooks were as creative as their modern day counterparts.  i know of no true
>cook worth the name (in any time period) that cannot adapt or improvise a
>recipe from previous experience and what is at hand.

But what is the result? If he is a good cook, the result is a tasty dish.
If he is a good medieval cook modifying a medieval recipe, the result is a
tasty medieval dish. If he is a good modern cook modifying a medieval
recipe, the result is a tasty dish that is a mix of medieval and modern
cuisine. That is a perfectly reasonable way of cooking your own dinner, but
if you serve it to people in a context where they will assume it is
medieval cooking, you are misleading them.

Of course, one possible solution is to do so much medieval cooking and
eating that you can be confident your changes are ones a medieval cook
would have made. It is possible that by now there are some people competent
to do that--but in my experience, they aren't the ones making arguments for
"creative" period cooking.

>	again, i agree that period research is a very necessary and integral
>part of the SCA.  but i also think that insisting on a precise following of
>the recipie leaves out any creative input that an individual cook may have
>and gives you no potential for progress.

If you really believe that, and are not merely employing rhetorical
exaggeration,  you can't have looked very carefully at period recipes. How
can following a recipe that contains no quantities, temperature or times
"leave out any creative input that an individual cook may have?"

By "potential for progress" do you mean "potential for making better
medieval food than was made in the middle ages?" If so, do you think that
is a reasonable goal?

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


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