Subject: SC - tongue

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

At 5:09 PM -0400 4/25/00, CBlackwill at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 4/25/00 12:31:35 PM Pacific Daylight Time, lcm at efn.org
>writes:
>
>  > While I enjoyed the list of recipes, I disagree with your conclusion.
>  >  You cited recipes that have alternatives written within them, but then
>  >  you seem to suggest (as you have been for some time) that these prove
>  >  that you can make substitutions that _aren't_ listed.
>
>Of course it proves that you can make substitutions that aren't listed
>(again, provided those substitutions are appropriate to the dish, and
>available at the time, and in the region in question).  The evidence points
>to the fact that these recipes were not as strict and inflexible as the list
>seems to think, but rather offered as guidelines to the medieval cook.

But nobody argues that the medieval cooks didn't make substitutions. 
The argument is that, unless we have their list of substitutions for 
a particular recipe (as in the examples given), we don't know what 
substitutions they would have used. And the fact that they 
substituted A for B in one recipe doesn't mean they would have made 
the same substitution in another. As any modern cook knows, what 
substitutes work varies with the recipe.

Everybody agrees that the information available to doesn't include 
all of the dishes that a medieval cook might have made. What it does 
include is all of the dishes that we know a medieval cook might have 
made.

In another post, Balthazar wrote:

"Le Menagier, for instance, was written by a French lord for his wife"

Not a lord--pretty clearly upper middle class. He comments that some 
things are appropriate for a knight's household but too fancy for his.

Morgana Abbey wrote:

" From what I can see, the other surviving cookbooks are more like 
recordings of special events. "

Off hand I cannot think of any cookbook that fits that description, 
although there might be some. _Du Fait de Cuisine_, for example, is a 
proposal for a feast the cook wants to do, not a record of one he has 
done. Most of the others are just collections of recipes.

And later writes:

"Would it make people feel better if we rename every recipe when we make
even the tiniest change?"

My concern is primarily with the names of the dishes, but in making 
sure that cooks don't tell people things are period unless they had 
good reason to believe they are. The more changes you make in the 
recipe (not including changes suggested as possibilities in the 
recipe) the less reason you have to believe what you have made is 
period--i.e. is something a period cook would have made.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/