SC - Learning to Redact Recipes (Was Re: How do I get Started?)

[david friedman]

At 9:50 AM -0400 4/5/00, Cobb, Toby wrote:

>Hey, Cooks!  How do y'all run your redaction groups?

We announce a cooking workshop for a Saturday and ask everyone who is 
coming to let us know a day or so in advance. The day before, we 
select a number of period recipes from primary sources about equal to 
the number of people who will be there. Some of them are period 
recipes we have never done, some are period recipes that were tried 
one or more times at previous workshops but not gotten to a 
satisfactory version. We do the shopping. New recipes are entered 
into the word processor (in the original form, but in English 
translation if the original is in another language).

People start arriving about 1 P.M. Saturday. As each person arrives, 
he is handed the stack of printed out recipes and asked to pick one. 
Each person cooks one dish. We are available to make suggestions, 
point to where the bowls are, etc. When each dish comes off the stove 
or out of the oven, everyone not too busy samples it. We record 
people's opinions on the recipe (in the computer) for the next try.

People are instructed to keep careful records of everything they 
do--quantities, temperature, and time--so that we can reproduce the 
result.

We try to follow a policy of making sure that anyone who has never 
done this before gets a recipe that has not been tried before, since 
part of the objective is to show people that it really is possible to 
work from a period recipe.

The workshop generally  breaks up around six or seven. We've never 
yet had to send out for Pizza.

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