SC - poetry/cooking (is this on topic?)

[Russell Gilman-Hunt]

*Cooks, should we take this discussion private, or does it bear
on subjects on the Cooks' List?*

Branwen wrote:
- ------
Anyhow - I am not truly suggesting such a haphazard approach. I too am a
poet with great concern for period form. I am also a student of medieval
literature with a bit of an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon poetry. I am greatly
concerned with keeping things as period as possible. However, I do
stress
that it should be within reason.

I do not merely suggest combining period ingredients without concern
for the
styles and methods already demonstrated and documented in period
recipes. I
am not trying to create completely new dishes. I am merely suggesting
that
reasonable and researched hypotheses are sometimes allowable. Especially
when I cook "Viking" food.

I consider "period" to refer to a style of representation which strives
to
be a reasonable approximation. And, yes, this is different from
authentic.
Sorry for the misuse of language on my part previously. (8th and 9th
graders
kill the brain.) Again, the example of Anglo-Saxon riddles and poetry
comes
to mind. I hate it when translations of certain riddles along with the
"answer" are printed without a footnote to the effect that the answer is
really just one scholar's guess. When that footnote is present, however,
along with the support for the answer, I enjoy reading it.

What I am really trying to say is that while we have many many
resources, we
still do not have  complete, or even close to complete, materials and
evidence. My grandmother is a great Yugoslavian cook - a follower of the
oral cooking tradition. She has only to taste something and she can
duplicate it and improve upon it. She, and many of her predecessors,
never
needed recipes, unlike myself.  I am not saying I can just make up
recipes,
based upon that assumption. I am just concerned that adhering strictly
to
what was written down also does not give us an accurate and holistic
recreation of the middle ages. 
- -----

Given that my time period is 12th century Ireland, I too have the 
same questions about creating appropriate foods for my persona. I
could assemble lists of all the food items I have read about (all
the ingredients) but without knowing what was considered to be in
taste, it would be hard to create a recipe that I could call 
appropriate to my persona.  It's like knowing about alliteration,
rhyme, and other poetic tools and trying to assemble a proper
poem.

If you look at a period recipe and a period poetic form, though,
there are some similarities; and you could almost call a form a
recipe for a poem.  If the recipe is "take the best parts of a 
cow, hew them into gobbets, roll them in bread crumbs and then
toss them into wine and boil until done" there is a whole range of
things you could interpret into the recipe. What is the best part
of a cow? How big is a gobbet? What kind of bread? What kind of 
wine? What is "done?" The same is true for period forms; "five feet
of duh-dump rhythm, every four lines rhyming in a pleasing manner."  

However, to assemble a finished item from such a "recipe" is sometimes
a hard task.  That, I consider to be our goals.  To take a step back
and to say "here is a poetic form used by their neighbors, and here
is what rhyme schemes are typical of Ireland" is not to re-create an
Irish item.  This, I see as analogous to "here are the ingredients in
Ireland, and this is a Swiss recipe for an item that may be set in 
Ireland in this fashion."

I think you are comparing two levels of recreation when you compare 
writing poetry based on period poems (new poems) and not using a 
period recipe, but more of a general sense of what kinds of foods they
might have eaten based on stories and sagas.  You could compare the 
*redaction* of a period recipe and a new poem based on a poetic recipe,
and I think you'd be doing well.  The other way, to say "here is an
item that they may have eaten but we don't really know" is in some
ways a harder road to walk (document it very well, for competitions or
presentations) but certainly a valid road to walk (again, but it is 
different from presenting a food based on a period recipe.)

Basically, what I am saying is that the two roads of recreating period
stuff and recreating what may have been period and can be conjecturally
supported are two different roads, and please don't make one into the
other.

Filidh Conchobar Mac Muirchertaig

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