SC - Cooks adapting/Creating Recipes WAS: saffron (a really long time ago)

[david friedman]

>CBlackwill at aol.com writes:
>
><<
>  I wonder if the Lord of the Manor ever got tired of eating the same recipes,
>  and ordered his cooks to "do something different, for Pete's sake!"  Do you
>  suppose they would have made substitutions then?  Chervil instead of Dill?
>  Capon instead of Duck?  Do you suppose they would have kept their jobs (or
>  their heads) if they didn't?
>
>  Just curious,
>
>  Balthazar of Blackmoor
>   >>

Very likely there were such variations--to some extent one can check 
them by seeing the variant versions of the same recipe that appear in 
different places. The problem with modern cooks taking a recipe and 
then making their own variants is that we know a great deal less 
about medieval cooking than a medieval cook did, hence do not know 
just what variations would or would not have seemed appropriate to a 
medieval cook. Varying a period recipe, especially doing it to fit 
our tastes, is likely to mean changing it in ways that make it more 
like a modern recipe, hence less medieval.

I think, by the way, that "or their heads" reflects a historically 
implausible view of the Middle Ages. Doing your job badly was not a 
criminal offense then, any more than it was now. You might consider 
that the total fraction of the population in prison in medieval 
England was a great deal lower than in modern-day America.

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