SC - To Rant or not To Rant ??? (Long and Rambling)

[david friedman]

At 11:59 AM -0600 2/13/00, RANDALL DIAMOND wrote:

>  Do  period authenticitists search out
>period varietals to serve at their feasts?

The only period apple other than summer rambo that I have seen sold 
commercially is the lady apple, and that very rarely. So in practice, 
I don't search out period varietals, since they normally are not 
there to be found. I do plant them--but I have moved around too much 
over the past twenty-five years, so the only one I actually have 
available is a green gage plum that I planted when we moved here, and 
that has just started to bear.


...

>Does this
>bother purists among us?


In my view, it is a great mistake to make the best the enemy of the 
good--to not do moderately authentic things that you can do because 
they are inferior to the perfectly authentic things that you cannot 
do.

Or in other words, I would prefer to use more authentic ingredients, 
but mostly I can't, and so don't.


>Just because we lack a written recipe doesn't mean it wasn't
>eaten in period.


No--but it means that we don't know how it was cooked in period. We 
may be able to guess, but the more guesswork, the less likely we are 
to be right--and there are lots of things out there for which we do 
have written recipes that nobody has cooked in recent centuries.

>As was stated recently the numbers of recipes
>we have before 1500 is quite limited.

I would have said that it was quite large. Off hand, I can think of 
sources for 500-1000 recipes just from the Islamic world. For Europe 
we have pre 1500 recipes from multiple sources for England and 
France, Italy, Germany, ...   .  I would be surprised if the total 
wasn't at least 500 recipes, probably a good deal more.


Your future plans sound ambitious; I certainly hope you succeed in them.

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