SC - Re: A question of re-creation

[LadyPDC at aol.com]

Greetings all,

Due to an illness which caused my mailbox to overflow and necessitate mass 
deletions, I have missed the first parts of this conversation.

However, I did see my name in a recent post and have caught some, I think, of 
the recent gist of the conversations.

Understanding that I may have missed the original thrust of the conversation 
(I would appreciate it if someone could send me some of it that I missed) 
please allow me to entertain some thoughts of my own on the recent turns 
posted.

On the subject of whether an entrant should be given extra credit for growing 
their own ingredients, I would say that it should depend on the entry and the 
reasons.  And that this should be spelled out in the documentation.  As an 
example, in the recent Kingdom A&S I entered a "Salat".  I researched and 
learned that most "Salat" would have been made from items available in the 
garden and that this was the reason that there were several versions of this 
recipe.  The versions being dependent on the season when the dish was being 
made.  Given these facts and given proper documentation, then the extra 
points for having grown the ingredients is realistic because the 
documentation shows that the general housewife would have grown them in her 
own garden.

Along another line, I prepared a dish which involved making a pastry castle.  
I made this pastry castle using hand ground period flour.  I would agree that 
this should not get any extra points if the only reason for mentioning the 
hand ground flour was that it was used in this project.  That was not the 
case.  The documentation again clearly spelled out that I had experimented 
(thereby bringing in the Science part of the A&S) with modern white enriched 
flour, modern wheat flour, and the hand ground flour to see what differences 
occurred in making the pastry castle walls.  The actual entry was the castle, 
the sauces and fillings were added as mere displays and were not part of the 
entry itself.  And I did, indeed find that the flour made a great difference 
in the formation, baking, and solidity of the castle walls and towers.  Going 
by the judges comments, the extra points were given for the experimentation 
which added to the general knowledge about behave of different types of flour 
in pastry not just for the fact that the flour was hand ground.

On the judging comments which ask that every ingredient be created or grown 
by the artisan, I couldn't agree more that this is wrong.  I myself ran into 
this at that same competition when a judge on one of my liqueurs marked me 
down for not having grown my own cardamom.  When I asked her about the 
comment she said that she had looked at my cooking entries and noticed that I 
grew my own ingredients there and expected the same of the spices in my 
brewing entries.  An unrealistic expectation but I have to admit that I 
failed to put in my documentation that I purchased the cardamom because that 
is what a French lady would have done during my time period.  My bad and I 
deserved to lose points for it in my opinion.

A lady in my kingdom is trying to put together training for judges and I 
think that this would be most helpful.  However, in the end it is our 
responsibility as entrants to "educate" whomever might read our documentation 
as to the project which we have created.

Lady Constance de la Rose