SC - reminiscing as source

[Bonne of Traquair]

>From: nanna at idunn.is (Nanna Rognvaldardottir)
>
>The following passage describes how this
>type of bread was made. The author (who, BTW, wrote the only Icelandic book
>available on the foodstuffs of the Viking age) notes that he is describing 
>a
>very old method that was still used when he was growing up in rural Iceland
>in around 1900:

Not to discount Nanna (whose knowledge I value greatly) nor the gentlemen 
making the recollection, but I always wonder, when reading something like 
this that seems to leave something out, if the former child simply didn't 
really know all that was involved.  There may well have been a starter, a 
sweetener or something else.  If the now grown up and old person thinking 
back to childhood states they were specifically taught such and such, that's 
different.  But when they seem to be recalling only what they observed and 
remember, I wonder what they didn't and don't.  Since Nanna tells us the 
gentlemen wrote about food, this may not be a valid example of what worries 
me.

For that matter, sometimes statements made by adults make me wonder if they 
really knew what was going on in the kitchen, or were guessing.  Sure lots 
of the recipes work better than you might think when you don't stray into 
what you know will work, others times maybe it won't. I've done more reading 
than testing.  Could be a lot of the problem is that the person translating 
and/or redacting didn't know how to cook and came up with weirdness.

Bonne

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