SC - favorite sweet

[Philip & Susan Troy]

swbro at mail.telis.org wrote:
> 
> Speaking of Esther Aresty's _The Delctable Past_, I picked up a copy of it
> at an auction this weekend.  It looks like a survey type of book, has
> anybody read it, and what do you think about it?

As I recall it had two or three recipes that were immensely popular (and
incidentally good food) and which were considered state-of-the-art in
the SCA 25 or 30 years ago, when there were fewer primary source
materials easily available. As with a lot of the older, less-used source
materials, it lives in the buried-and-only-semi-accessible layer of my
bookshelves, along with things like "Dining With William Shakespeare". I
recall Aresty's adaptations of such period recipes as the Mustard Sops
from Le Viandier de Taillevent, and an adapted eighteenth-century recipe
for Richmond Maids of Honor doing double-duty for both the
Georgian/Regency sweet and medieval darioles, even though they're pretty
different. Aresty is also the source of the recent hubbub on this list
regarding the Great Rosti Question.

In general I'd say she represents state-of-the-art SCA cookery, also
incidentally tasty food, from 30 years ago, which has been superceded by
just as tasty food made through better research.

As I've frequently said in the past, many of us unfairly revile books
like "Fabulous Feasts", and the one discussed above, for their
inadequacies, while at the time of their publication there wasn't a lot
else available in the way of source materials for those who didn't want
to deal with untranslated or unmodernized primary sources. There was no
"Take a Thousand Eggs or More", no second edition of "Pleyn Delit". No
first edition, in fact. Also, these books don't address the specific
needs of SCAdians very well at all, but they weren't designed to. They
were designed more for people to play at home with doing a medieval
feast that was more about costume-party fun than about education.
Authenticity wasn't considered important, and since it sold fewer books,
why include it as a criterion? 

In any case, I have a soft spot in my heart for such books, and can't
bear to get rid of them, but I rarely cook from them today.
     
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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