SC - questions

[david friedman]

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/