SC - Re: A question of re-creation

[ChannonM at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/27/00 11:02:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
owner-sca-cooks at ansteorra.org writes:

> So perhaps when you enter a piece on which you spent a ton of time and
>  grew/milled the ingredients (or grew/sheared/spun/wove) you should enter
>  them as multiple entries.  Save back some of the flour, maybe even some of
>  the grain if you grew it.  Write up how you milled it separately and how
>  it was grown.  True, a judge may look at a pile of flour as an entry and
>  laugh,  but if you researched period milling and flour grain size and did
>  your best to re-create it, you should be recognized for your ability as
>  milling and _NOT_ your cooking skills, since cooks didn't mill.
>  
>  My question (though I am sure other conversations will come from the
>  above) is:
>  Other than a multiple entry piece, how should we be dealing with projects
>  built from scratch so that we are not overstating the fact of what period
>  cooks did, and not understating the talents of the entrant?
>  
>  Cu drag,
>  Bogdan

These questions have bothered me too.First of all, let me state that I am not 
whining, I am very happy with the overall experience of particitpating and 
felt that the judges comments had valid points. I submitted an A&S entry on 
confits, and one of the comments was that I should have ground my sugar by 
hand in a mortar (I agreed, I actually had some sugar in a mortar that was 
ground by hand for display but the actually cooking quantity was done  by 
machine- I have tendonitis and carple tunnel(sp?) so it is not reasonable for 
me to hand grind much of anything if I want to hold a cup of coffee 
afterwards, this was explained in my documentation)
I used various seeds and nuts as the medium of the confits. It was pointed 
out that I would have gotten higher marks had I grown my own seeds (ie, 
coriander and anise, fennel are all easily grown in my area.) I have actually 
taken to growing coriander for the next Kingdom A&S just to follow through. 
As well, I have set aside rose petals I grew for period colouring and will 
use things like saffron and maybe spinach for other colours (I had used food 
dye)

In retrospect, though, I'm not so sure that a cook would have been ensuring 
that they grew their own seeds ( wouldn't they have gotten these from a 
spicer, or from the gardener or their manor etc?) 

I can see the cook needing to discriminate as to what is good coriander and 
what is bad coriander as to how it would effect their dish. But as to 
actually growing it, I'm not sure they would have done that. Would they have 
overseen the gardens? Wasn't there a Master Gardener who would have done this 
instead?

In addition the submission was placed in a category that was all wrong, the 
only one they said it could go in was "Illusion foods", well, confits are no 
illusion nor do they try to be, so I lost points for that too.

Well, I can't complain as I did well for a first time submission (it took a 
first anyway). I have included the suggestions of the judges where I felt 
they improved the work. I look forward to hearing others interpretations.

Hauviette