SC - marocco food

[david friedman]

At 11:58 AM +0200 10/6/99, ana l. valdes wrote:
>As I wrote, the recipe was taken from Conrans book and I assumed it
>could be "reasonable period", what it means, the tajine itself is a very
>old kind of cooking ware, used by nomadic people since Antiquity, duck
>and chicken and wild ands were hunted by falcons under Saladinos time
>and before.
>Honey and raisins and dates and saffran are very typical regional food
>in the Middle East and Africa. Sweet potatoes are very similar to yams,
>maybe in the "original recipe", (if it was some), the vegetable was yams
>(originally from Africa and not from South America) and Conran now
>wanted to make the dish easier. (Sweet potatoes or yams are very
>similar, but I dont have any idea what is easier to get, sweet potatoes
>or yams).

On the other hand ...  . Cooking techniques and styles sometimes change
over time, in ways unrelated to changes in the available foodstuffs and
equipment. Consider the standard modern technique for making a thick liquid
(gravy, sauce) by stirring flour into hot fat, then adding liquid to create
an emulsion. The necessary ingredients and equipment were available in
period. But the technique seems essentially unknown (I think someone has
pointed to one example in a German cookbook where they seem to be using it)
until the seventeenth century.

So I think that before concluding that a modern recipe is reasonably
period, one really has to look at the period cookbooks for that culture
(_Manuscrito Anonimo_ in this case, or the other, less accessible
Andalusian cookbooks) to see if there are similar things.

>By the way, the most of todays geographs share the hypothesis America
>and Africa was once the same continent and the "jointure" is from Souh
>America to South Africa.
>If we follow this kind of reasoning its not strange find vegetables and
>animals related in the both continents.

As best I (and Elizabeth, my main source for such things) recall, Africa
and South America separated something like fifty to a hundred million years
ago--before most of the species we are familiar with existed. The land
bridge over the Bering straits, on the other hand, existed at several times
in the last million years--it is, among other things, how our species is
believed to have reached the New World. So while continental drift may
explain some cases of related species--where the common ancestor was a long
time ago (Elizabeth thinks that is the case for some varieties of trees),
migration across the land bridge explains more recent cases.

Then, of course, there are always flying birds, and seeds carried in the
digestive tracts of flying birds, and ...   .

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


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