SC - OOP recipe request - bugs and my final word on tolerance

[Diana Haven]

sca-cooks at ansteorra.org wrote:
> Okay,  Niccolo diFrancesco, going to chop up your letter out of sequence.  :-)First and more important ... please furnish the webpage addresses for these cookbooks.  Your wrote:  "the resources available to us (no cheating on this one since 5 translated cookbooks are online)"  I am sure that the many "new" cooks on this list would like to peruse them.

Secondly - from your statement "It's like degree of confidence in statistics.  One knows that, unless there is a written account as evidence, any substitution will cause deviation from an accurate recipe that is found from the time period in question."

This brings to mind my college class in statistics.  My professor said on the VERY FIRST DAY... "Statistics are made up of facts and facts never lie, but statisticians can manipulate the facts."  (made me want to stay in the class )<<<SNIP>>>

1.  Her eis the first link I have.  It is to the links of Cariadoc's Miscellany.  You'll find three cookbooks there.  I'll get others tonight from my bookmarks at home.: http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Medieval/Medieval.html

2.  It is exactly the logic you present that makes me want to present my 'knowledge' to people for scrutiny, and why I encourage others to do so.  We can talk ourselves into believing nearly any cause/effect relationship that has interest; it is the nature of the human mind to seek sense in the face of confusion.  I learned a long time ago to remember correlational relationship rather than case/effect unless there is solid objective reason to believe otherwise.  I will posit a hypothesis with intent to test and verify/refute it, and then go to testing.

MY goal is acquiring knowledge and increasing the accuracy and breadth of that knowledge.  I gotta be out and sharing it for others to view in order to get a perspective.  Do I get wackos giving me extremem  viewpoints? Yes.  Do I get commentary from people too far beyond my current level of expertise and interest?  Occasionally.  Ususally I get additional viewpoints that refute or support my hypothesis, which then gets modified or scrapped.  I don't think I'll ever be able to state with absolute, 100% confidence much about historical information.  There seems to be a lot of information out there that I don't yet know that could mitigate my obsolute (let alone the much conjectured cuckynole heresy).

I ain't there, wasn't there, and can't be there.  I can make my best extrapolation of what happened in that kitchen in Northern Umbria in 14th century which approaches absolute accuracy, but it isn't going to be exactly on point too often. The more I learn and understand, the closer I can approach it, but now we are getting into calculus as 
h-> 0.  

OTOH, if I want to make a medievalish dinner tonight for 5 friends and have a limited ingredient list, I'llcheck the old textbooks and find something that I have enough ingredients to satisfy my personal ethic, and substitute the rest.  If I may indulge, though, saffron is one thing that I cannot rationalize for myself to substitue...I move to something else if it isn't on the shelf.  Keep those spices in the freezer, and they last a LONG time.

i this what you were looking for?  I know I went on a bit.

niccolo difrancesco