SC - at the market

[grizly@mindspring.com]

I am using modern culture to pose this point:  The actual practice of daily cookery and the published cookery books can be very different.  We are using published historical texts to try to extrapolate prevailing public opinion.  It will be just as difficult in 300 years to make extrapolations of this culture.  There are TONS of fad books out there that follow one health schematic or another.  That doesn't mean that it is the prevailing cusine OR medical theory, just that someone thought their book would sell.

Could be a similar sort of thing in our history time frame of interest.  It seems that we are seeing a microcosm of cookery in the extant translated sources rather than the entire body of cookery done between 600 and 1600.  We can make generalizations, but we lose more "degrees of confidence" the farther we go from the printed text we have.  It is certainly reasonable to expect that variances were made, just not often recorded as to what and/or why they were made.  We hit a gap of evidence that must be bridged by logic and reason.  That's where the community of cookery scholars will be useful in evaluating any proposed explanation or assertion based on logic and reason.  It's almost like solving that mystic age-old Falsar's(?) last theorum.

niccolo difrancesco

<<<<Adamantius Wrote:
It probably wasn't a universally guiding force then any more than
considerations regarding cholesterol and food additives are now. Most of us disobey our doctors now and then. Charlemagne did in the matter of roast meats versus boiled.

On the other hand, Anthimus (who was himself, of course, a doctor),
Platina, Maynard Mayneri (whassisname, the Opusculum Saporibus guy) and Chiquart all make specific references to humoral qualities of foods, and Taillevent, in his sometimes rather peculiar-seeming combinations of frying, parboiling, and roasting the same piece of meat, for example, seems as if he probably was practicing a tradition of medically-informed cookery, even if he didn't know that that's what he was doing. This doesn't prove or even suggest it was universal, though. But it existed.<<SNIP>>>>>>>>>