SC - Documented Substitutions

[Gaylin]

Melbrigda wrote about Libra de arte coquinaria saying:

>But notice though that they aren't substituting beef for fowl.  They
>list a series of different fowl that would be appropriate.  Probably
>if calf wasn't available they might  have used lamb (or vice versa)

I'm afraid I'd have to disagree with you on this. We don't have any
indication that they would have used lamb or vice versa. The
original recipe is snipped from Balthazar's kind posting of of
the substitution recipes, but there's nothing in the recipe that
indicates a choice of lamb.

>Small game such as rabbit might be substituted for other small game
>animals.  Make sense?  So you wouldn't substitute beef for pheasant.

Personally, I don't think that either of these assumptions can be
made. I don't think any of the texts cited support this in the
slightest. I'm sorry. Perhaps I'm missing what you're seeing,
but I really don't think it can be stated as such.

Now Balthazar kindly asked:

> > (question:  In
> > humoral theory, were all vegetables considered to have the same properties,
> > as this recipe makes no mention of it, and seems to treat all vegetables
> > generically?)

All vegetables were not treated equally as humoral theory
goes. Platina is a good place to see this demonstrated, but if
you want the ultimate source, I would check Pliny's Natural
History (which is where Platina stole his health-related
information, anyway).

Two things also to consider. First, the thing you call a
vegetable may have been considered a spice and a vegetable,
depending on use in a dish. I'm thinking here specifically
of onions in Platina, but I'd be willing to bet my best
apron that there are more examples I can't think of right
now. Second, the way you prepared a vegetable and used
it radically changed the humoral effect that vegetable had
on the body.

Laine chimed in happily with an interesting example:

>There are many ways to make meatloaf. One of my cookbooks has three
>different recipes on the same page. You can use onions or not, tomato
>sauce or not, you can use hamburger or a combination of beef and pork,
>you can even put ketchup on top. And you can use breadcrumbs or oatmeal
>for filler.

Which is very much a good point and one I've been arguing
with my husband for quite some time, both with regards to
meatloaf, and in the context of the present discussion. When
you look at the corpus of recipes we have, there are some
very interesting patterns that start to emerge across cookbooks.
Sometimes you have to follow trade route patterns and
sometimes you just have to follow the stemma of a particular
manuscript, but the patterns you see in the recipes we use
are actually *very* similar to your meatloaf example,
Laine.

I know of at least one person following a similar course of
research on this topic. Perhaps I can convince her to come
out and present some of it sometime.

Jasmine
Iasmin de Cordoba, Midrealm