SC - Ravioli, dumplings, and excoriation

[Siegfried Heydrich]

Thank you Jasmine for the very necessary sense of perspective.  

All this talk about humoural theory as if it were carved in stone was
reminding me of Reay Tannehill's chapter in Food in History when she
pointed out that what people say they eat and what the retail sales
figures show are very very different.  People wrote things down for many
reasons and edification of distant future generations probably wasn't one
of them.  (Self-agrandisement was most likely reason #1)

Here's a quick test:  Go to the diet section (the cookbook section would
also work)  in your local bookstore and scan the titles.  Now think like
a future archeologist.  Then go home and look in your larder.  You don't
eat like what a future archeologist would assume based on those books. 
We shouldn't assume everyone in the middles ages ate according to the few
surviving medical books either.  The wealthy people who owned that book,
sure.

As for the surviving cookbooks, the brewers will tell you that the odd
recipes, the specialty brews are what got written done.  All you older
cooks probably remember that 20-30 years ago, you couldn't find a recipe
in a book for mashed potatoes.  "Everyone knows how to do that."  Now we
have cooking for dummies that even tells you to take the soup out of the
can first.  (Maybe future generations will think we were all hopeless
chowderdheads?)

So as far as I can tell, we do our best with what we can.  If everyone's
happily eating, you did good.  If it conforms to what little we know
about feast foods for that particular time and place and everyone's
happily eating, you did better.  If it conforms to the above but no one's
eating it, you just wasted time and resources.  Tastes change, just like
the food fads.

Just have fun.  This is a hobby, remember?

Morgana

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