SC - Poppa's mustard
LrdRas@aol.com
LrdRas at aol.com
Wed Jun 14 21:03:27 PDT 2000
At 5:43 PM -0400 6/14/00, Jenne Heise wrote:
>As a relatively inexperienced SCA cook who's done too much reading, and
>whose personal interest is in Eastern Europe, I'm really interested in the
>philosophical basis for this. Also, I notice that new SCA cooks are often
>sent directly to collections of medieval recipes, rather than to the
>secondary sources about food and cooking in the Middle Ages that purport
>to give a background on the subject, and I'm interested as to why.
One reason is that you learn more about how to cook a dish from a
recipe for that dish than from some modern person's comments on the
cuisine. A second reason is that secondary sources are of highly
variable quality.
But the more fundamental reason, in my opinion, is that working from
period recipes gives you one of the central experiences possible in
the Society--figuring out how medieval people did things for
yourself, from what they themselves told us. It gets you directly to
the coal face, instead of a hundred miles from the mine burning fuel
that other people have mined, packaged, and delivered. Your teachers
are people who lived in period. That is simply more fun and more
intellectually exciting than reading some modern person's opinion of
what medieval cooking was like--which is why I, at least, try to get
new people to jump right in and try cooking a recipe from a period
cookbook. It is the difference between taking a course and doing
original scholarship--and one of the few places where there is a
really good opportunity for ordinary people, without years of
specialized training, to do the latter.
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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