SC - New World Foods-rant (was: turkey)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> 
> I am not criticizing your post so much as trying to understand the logic
> behind it. The fact remains that we have many hundreds of recipes dating from
> pre-13th century CE Europe that can be used in feasts. The fact that they are
> from Andalusia is totally irrelevant so far as there usefulness in
> reproducing pre-13th century CE European feasts.
> 
> Ras

I guess the point (and it can be argued either way, but I'd rather not
just now) is that a lot of the Andalusian recipes are demonstrably for
recognizable variants on Arabic foods, not really European ones. If you
look at the elusive Huici-Miranda thingy, the bad translation of the
12th-13th-century Arabic/Andalusian manuscript that Rudolf Grewe was
working on when he died, it appears to be fairly unique in that it
represents what seems to be both pre-Islamic (or at least non-Islamic)
Spanish cookery, as well as Islamic cookery that seems to have been at
least marginally adapted to the Spanish environment. It uses olive oil
more than butter, tail fat, and sesame oil, for example, which Arabic
sources like al-Baghdadi don't. It seems to represent an avoidance of
chick peas; whether as a class or cultural or just a geographical
characteristic is unclear. In short, in spite of being in Arabic, it is
pretty clearly Spanish food (I should say Iberian, huh, since Spain as
we know it had yet to be united). I don't believe this is as true of a
number of other Arabic-language sources found in Spain, even if they
were used as viable cookbooks in Europe, any more than the couple of
Chinese cookbooks I have that are written in Chinese should be looked at
and immediately classified as American cookbooks.
    
That's the point, although I do think many of us tend to overlook the
Islamic sources when considering medieval European cuisine. I have to
make something of a conscious effort, myself, at times.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com