SC - period cooking (LONG!)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

"Kappler, MMC Richard A." wrote:
> 
> the critiques I got said it probably should have cooked
> longer so it wasn't as coarse, should be creamier, not quite so much ginger,
> and a few other well thought out and gladly received critiques.  But how did
> they know it should be creamier?  How did they know less ginger?  Is it
> based on personal taste?  Is it based on experience?

Yes.        To a large extent, the more experience you have as a cook,
the greater the visual, textural, and saporial (is that a word? I meant,
flavor-wise) information stored in your head as to what will happen to
Food X when you do Thing Y to it. Then there are various textual clues
in the recipes. The frumenty recipes, for example, tend to speak of
cooking the stuff till the wheat bursts: the starches will have
gelatinized to the extent that the little hull or bran layer, or
whatever holds it together after those layers are removed, can't hold
the expanding wheat goo inside anymore. After you've made enough boiled
grain pottages (and they do exist in modern settings, various oatmeal
porridges and southern Chinese jook or congee being prime examples) you
realize, from simple observation, that the dish stops being one of grain
in water, but rather exploded grains in a goo composed of gelatinized
grain starch mixed with water. At some point it leaves the
chicken-and-rice soup stage and becomes more of a pudding. Let it get
cold and it becomes a flummery. Yuch. But that's another story.
Frumenties cooked in a manner similar to a pilaf tend not to have that
exploded-grain-in-starchy-goo effect, because they don't cook long
enough, don't have enough liquid, and because or their comparative
dryness, tend to burn. Besides which, they wouldn't require a thickening
of egg yolks to make them stand up in peaks, which, again, most recipes
specify.  

> If you take two period
> dishes, prepared by two different cooks from the same recipe with the same
> ingredients, they will come out different.  If you take, for example,
> Adamantius or Ras cooking stupid tv cook on toast, and Puck cooking stupid
> tv cook on toast, from a period recipe, I'm sure we would both produce tasty
> period dishes, but I also know that theirs would be correct, and mine would
> not be.  Not that mine would be incorrect, mind you.....just not what the
> collective would expect stupid tv cook on toast to be like.

Thass more than _I_ know! My experiences and familiarity with other
dishes from other (but often related) traditions will lead me into
anticipating what the given dish ought to be like. Other people, other
experiences, = different dishes in the end.

I guess what you're driving at, is how do you know if you're moving in
the "right" direction, and how do you push yourself in that direction?
Those are difficult questions. You'll note that I tried to arrange a
time and place to discuss that over immoderate quantities of Scotch; I
think it would be easier. At least until I start speaking in strange
tongues, which those who've been on the list a while are aware tends to
happen to me under the influence of a lot of uisgebaugh. Maybe I'll even
call certain select peers wusses again.

But to get back to your questions, or maybe my conception of them, the
best thing I can think of is to say that you're driving a car, and you
have a set of directions for the locality you're supposed to be going
to, and a vague concept of a map of the world in your head. If you are
headed in the wrong direction, and suddenly you encounter mountains the
directions don't speak of, or they speak of an endless plain instead,
you know you're probably going the wrong way. If, on the other hand, the
directions pick up from a Seven-Eleven store on Route 17, and you know
how to get there, it seems likely the author of the directions and you
have the same destination in mind.

All right. I admit it. I need Scotch to answer this.
  
Adamantius (now you know why I've been evading this question!)
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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