SC - "period" cookery and "period" poetry

[david friedman]

At 5:28 PM -0700 5/20/99, redbear wrote:

>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.

There are some times and places for which we don't have recipes, so an
educated guess is the closest we can come. But I thought you were arguing
that we should create new recipes even for cuisines for which we had old
recipes.

On the more general issue which you (I think) raised, of poetry vs cooking
...  .

The relevant question is what art we are reproducing. If you want to
reproduce the art of a period Shakespearean actor, you don't have to write
your own plays and (for that purpose) you shouldn't, since Shakespeare's
plays are more like the plays a period Shakespearean actor would be
performing than a modern imitation would be. If you want to reproduce the
art of a period playwright, on the other hand, you do have to write your
own plays.

What many of us are interested in reproducing is the art of a period
cook--not the art of a period inventor of recipes. There are several
reasons for that choice:

1. It seems clear, from the heavy duplication of recipes in the corpus,
that period cooks did not routinely invent their own recipes--that a large
part of what they cooked consisted of their renditions of existing recipes.
Chiquart says he has never read a cookbook--yet many of his recipes are
very close, in content not words, to surviving recipes from elsewhere in
the same corpus.

2. Cooking from a period recipe permits plenty of creativity, given the
amount of information missing from a typical period recipe.

3. In order for anyone to competently reproduce the art of a period
inventor of recipes, somebody has to first reproduce the art of a period
cook--a lot of it--in order to provide the data needed to invent recipes
that are reasonably close to what a period inventor of recipes would have
invented. It is only quite recently that a significant number of people
have been doing that on any substantial scale. At this point, inventing
"new period recipes" from cuisines from which we have cookbooks feels, to
at least some of us, like an evasion--because you can't really do it until
you have first done a lot of cooking from the cookbooks, and mostly the
people who argue for it and say they are doing it haven't.

...

>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.

How do you get a more accurate recreation? By cooking recipes that don't
occur in the surviving corpus, you are producing recipes less likely to be
what they cooked than if you cooked recipes that do occur there, hence
moving the recreation farther away from an accurate one.

Given the choice between cooking fifty recipes from period 13th-15th c.
French/English cookbooks and fifty recipes that you made up as guesses at
new recipes in that cuisine, how can you argue that doing the second gives
a more accurate recreation, or teaches you more? If that isn't what you are
claiming, what is?

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


============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================