SC -poultry art, was 90 ingredients Holloptrida translation

[RANDALL DIAMOND]

At 10:20 AM -0400 6/11/00, Mercedes of the flame wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>I'm and aspiring feastacrat.
>
>Before I can get started on a bid, I need to get some questions 
>cleared up that are becoming a mental road block for me.
>
>What makes a 14th/15th century feast a feast?  Is it recipe's drawn 
>specifically from that era?  Must it be from only one country or 
>from several unless otherwise specified?

"Must" is usually the wrong term for things in the Society. People, 
and groups, vary a lot in how concerned they are with historical 
authenticity. One group might serve blatantly out of period food at 
feasts on a routine basis. At the other extreme, some individuals 
would argue that a 15th century English feast should not merely 
consist of 15th century recipes but a 15th century combination of 
recipes--the right number of courses, pattern of what sort of recipe 
is where in the feast, and the like.

So it is really a question of how authentic you, and the group you 
are cooking for, want to be.

>What are the limitations on doing a new world themed feast?

The main limitation is that we don't, so far as I know, have any 
cookbooks from the New World prior to 1600. You could do a feast 
using recipes from Old World cookbooks from just before 1600 that 
contain New World foods--but I think you will have a hard time 
finding any significant number of such recipies.  You could try to 
reconstruct New World recipes from surviving descriptions of the food 
that the Indians ate--there is at least one reasonably detailed 
account from one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, as I 
recall, but it isn't recipes.

>(I think the bidding autocrat is going for a 'Columbus' theme)

Taken literally, that rules out both of my suggestions. Columbus 
didn't contact the New World civilizations for which we have 
information on food, and the introduction of New World foods to the 
Old World happens after Columbus.

If you want to do something that has some real connection to period 
cooking, I would suggest a feast from about the time of Columbus. 
There are lots of surviving cookbooks that would fit that. You might 
start with Platina, which was printed less than a decade before 
Columbus set sail. It is Italian, Columbus was Italian.

>When should I be concerned about -exact- historic documentation? 
>Can use estimated time frame documentation?

You can do almost anything you please. If you make a serious effort 
to use recipes all of which are actually from period sources, you 
will be well above the median level of SCA authenticity. If you make 
them all from period sources from about the same time and place, you 
will doing much better than that.

>I see all these great links to online medieval recipe's but I'm 
>concerned about all the details that go into putting together a 
>feast menu.

Remember that the net is an open forum, so the fact that you see 
something online doesn't guarantee it is true. Many of the "medieval" 
recipes on the web really are medieval, but not all of them.

My general rule for printed sources is that you should never trust a 
secondary source that does not include the primary source. In other 
words, if all you have is a recipe in modern form that someone says 
is period, you have no way of knowing how much of it is really a 
period recipe and how much (possibly all) was invented by the person 
"interpreting" it.  So what you want is either the original recipe 
from the period source, which you can work out yourself (the fun 
part, in my view), or else a worked out recipe accompanied by the 
original, so that you can compare the two and see how closely the 
worked out version follows the original.

The rule applies to SCA publications (and web pages) as well as other 
things. The Known World Handbook has lots of bogus period recipes. So 
has at least one C.A. that I know of. T.I. has printed inaccurate 
material on period cooking. You really have to be willing to check 
for yourself, at least to the extent of reading the original and 
comparing it to the worked out version--and not trusting anyone who 
provides only the worked out version.

Hope that helps.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/