SC - interesting URL - food shopping!

[Elaine Koogler]

As happens today.  My mother got her spaghetti sauce recipe from a good friend.
I know that she modified it to our family's taste.  Both my sister and I got the
recipe, in turn, from our mother.  It was pretty much in the form of medieval
recipes, in that it was, for the most part, a listing of ingredients.  I'm not
sure what my sister has done with it, but I have made several modifications to
reflect my differing taste and increased awareness of different ingredients.  I
still don't have quantity information as to how much of what I add, and I have,
in turn, shared it with other friends who have enjoyed eating it and have asked
how I made it.  I think that all cooks do this, to one degree or another.  It's
just a part of the creative whatever that is part of us all...and why we enjoy
doing what we do!   If I felt that I had to slavishly follow a set formula in
cooking, as though it were a science experiment, I doubt whether I'd actually do
very much of it!

Even though this is a modern example, and even though I don't have a speck of
documentation for this being how it was done in period ;-), I have to believe
that this is how they did it because our human creativity can't have changed that
much!

Kiri

Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

> LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> >
> > In a message dated 8/29/00 12:54:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> > jenne at tulgey.browser.net writes:
> >
> > << but
> >  I think it's silly to think that other cooks knew 'exactly' how much the
> >  first cook thought was 'enough'.  >>
> >
> > Considering that cooks in manor houses and those that cooked for royals and
> > nobles were members of guilds , I don't find this silly at all.
>
> I don't know how true it is that professional cooks outside of towns
> were guild members, but certainly cooks worked with other cooks and
> learned from them, and there's at least the theoretical possibility that
> a specific technique could be passed from one generation of cooks to
> another, just as parents pass recipes to children. Of course, there's no
> guarantee quantities have never been forgotten, changed or tweaked over
> the generations, either, especially when different numbers of people
> were being served each time.
>
> Adamantius
> --
> Phil & Susan Troy
>
> troy at asan.com
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