SC - gravlax

[Angus]

At 1:38 PM -0400 6/26/00, Jennifer L Sweet wrote:

>question 1--- did they actually have an equivelent to hamburgers?!  or is
>this just writer's license?

I don't know about Cleopatra's time, but you get recipes for what are 
essentially cooked patties of chopped or pounded meat in the 13th 
century Islamic cookbooks.

>now, in my celtic cookbook, a good number of the recipes have potatoes in
>them...can turnips be substituted?

I'm not sure I see the point of doing so. If you don't care whether 
what you are making is period, you might as well leave in the 
potatoes. If you do care, a modern recipe with turnips substituted 
for potatoes is no more likely to be a period recipe than any other 
modern recipe that doesn't happen to have any ingredients not 
available in period. The fact that something calls itself a "celtic 
cookbook" doesn't imply that the recipes are  from our period--and 
the existence of potatoes in  recipes implies that they are not.

If you want to do period cooking, actually starting with  cookbooks 
written in period--some of which are currently available on the web, 
including a few on my site--makes more sense than taking modern 
recipes and trying to guess what their period ancestors might have 
been.

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