SC - questions

[Jenne Heise]

> I've seen a number of groups just get "lazy" about even trying to serve
> medieval food, or even medievaloid food.  I, for one, don't go to their
> events, and if I do end up going (they're hosting a kingdom-level event
> or some such)I will _not_ eat their food.  There is no reason to be
> serving watermelon, corn-on-the-cob, steak, and a baked potato at an SCA
> event.  Blech! If I want a mundane picnic, I'll go home and have one....

Yes, but that wasn't the point. The person who originally asked the
question was looking at trying to serve New World foods that would have
been served in Europe in period.

She was advised to junk the idea as we have no extant recipes (though
there is documentation of them being eaten, I know that, and probably some
description of how they were served), and instead throw together a bunch
of Italian recipes instead.

But... if one works only from recipes, higgledy-piggeldy, how would one
know whether one was producing a period meal? Why do recipes trump other
sources of information to the point where it is only acceptable to serve
foods from that corpus of recipes (though we know that the recipes that
we have are only a limited depiction of period cuisine, since most
recipes weren't written down), but perfectly ok to serve them randomly?
(Imagine chips'n'salsa, broiled salmon, pork chow mein, and spaghetti on a
table for a 20th century re-creation.)

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
   "My hands are small I know, but they're not yours, they are my own"