SC - Help!!!

[Elaine Koogler]

Your Grace,
I do not consider myself "picked on"...in fact, I joined the list to learn about things of this nature.  I threw out the ideas mentioned in your post hoping that someone would either help document them...or throw cold water on them!

Yes, I know about the dearth of material available on Viking/Norse cooking methods/recipes!  I was asked to do such a feast several years ago, and came up with a notable lack of information on what was done with food (other than roasting meat or stewing meat!).  What I wound up doing was to serve a feast consisting foods from lands that the Vikings had visited...celebrating the travels of the Crown Prince's ancestors!  It seemed to work, and the newly-made King was quite happy!

Kiri

david friedman wrote:

> At 1:15 PM -0400 6/9/00, Elaine Koogler wrote:
>
>      I'll have to go looking for it, but I suspect that Cock-a-leeky soup is period...at
>      least I believe it is.
>
> I don't want to pick on Kiri in particular, since what she is saying here appears in a lot of other posts, and conversations, in the SCA. But "I suspect ... is period ... at least I believe it is" generally means that someone else told you it was--and, in my experience, SCA oral tradition is a very unreliable source of information. If you encounter a recipe in the SCA or the mundane world and don't know what period source it came from, your working assumption should be that there isn't one.
>
> This isn't limited to recipes. I have been in the SCA long enough so that some of the traditional accounts one hears are of events I was a part of--and that isn't how they happened.
>
> Two things, in my view, are going on. One is that verbal transmission is a noisy medium. One person says "I think it is the sort of thing they might have had in period," and by the third or fourth person it goes through it has turned into "it is a period recipe." The other is that, within the SCA, being knowledgable, both about SCA history and about period history, is a source of prestige--with the result that some people exaggerate how much they know, and other people believe them.
>
> Kiri also writes:
>
>      Another possibility is to use some of the Norse/Viking recipes, if you have
>      access to them. After all, much of the northern part of Scotland was populated
>      by folks from the Northern lands!
>
> Unfortunately, we don't have any period Norse/Viking cookbooks either, so that doesn't solve the problem.
>
> After writing the above, I decided to see what I could learn on the net about the history of cock-a-leekie. I found one page that said the recipe was more than 300 years old, which would put it in the seventeenth century; no source was given. I also found the following assertion (about cock-a-leekie):
>
> As early as 1598 Fynes Morrison recorded that it was served at a Knight's house with boiling fowl (thus the "cock") and prunes.
>
> Further search found the following passage from Morrison, which I suspect is what is being referred to:
>
> 'I myself,' says the traveller Fynes Morrison, in the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the scene being the Lowlands of Scotland, 'was at a knight's house, who had many servants to attend him, that brought in his meat with their heads covered with blue caps, the table being more than half furnished with great platters of porridge each having a little piece of sodden meat. And when the table was served, the servants did sit down with us; but the upper mess, instead of porridge, had a pullet, with some prunes in the broth.'--TRAVELS, p. 155.
>
> If that is the right passage, what we have is evidence that Lowland Scots at the end of our period sometimes ate chicken stewed with some prunes. But that doesn't imply it was cock-a-leekie--for one thing, there are no leeks mentioned.
>
> On the other hand, the quote from Morrison does give a a little evidence on Scottish cooking in period.
> David/Cariadoc
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/