SC - questions

[david friedman]

At 11:50 AM -0400 6/15/00, Jenne Heise wrote:

(quoting me)

>  > 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.
>
>True. But redaction sources (which are also secondary sources) are also of
>highly variable quality.

By "redaction sources" do you mean "collections of worked out 
recipes?" If so, I entirely agree--and I don't send people to them 
either. We start new people interested in period cooking by letting 
them choose an original recipe I haven't done, and having them cook 
it--with both of us available to give advice. That's what our cooking 
workshops mostly consist of. We also have retries of recipes done at 
earlier workshops, but try to give them to people who have done at 
least one period recipe before.

Sometimes our "primary" sources are translations, so we are to some 
extent at the mercy of the translator, but aside from that the new 
person is working from the original.

>And of course the corpus of existing recipes
>represents a relatively small fraction of medieval cookery, by its very
>nature. How do you counteract the effect of that narrow focus and possible
>misinformation (such as "they never ate raw food" and "allspice is a
>good redaction for 'spices'")?

I don't see the first problem--the corpus of existing recipes may be 
a small fraction, but it is an enormous number of recipes. And I'm 
not trying to make people into scholars of medieval cookery--just 
cooks capable of working from medieval recipes. If they want to go 
further than that, reading secondary sources is one obvious way of 
doing so.

So far as the "misinformation," if they are working from an original 
recipe, they won't encounter allspice. If they want guesses about 
what "spices" means, they ask us or someone else there and we discuss 
it.

One of the dishes we did at our most recent workshop specified 
meatballs, but didn't say how to make them (aside from starting with 
chicken breast). So I provided the person who was doing that dish 
with my collection of "descriptions of how to make meatballs" culled 
from the same cookbook.





>
>Also, I keep seeing people say that a dish isn't period unless it was made
>from a redaction of a period recipe. Is that using the term 'period' as a
>kind of shorthand? (Because obviously there were lots of period ways of
>cooking period dishes that we don't have a recipe for because nobody wrote
>it down, and therefore that recipe for cooking that dish is not
>documentable. The dish itself may be documentable, but we have no way of
>telling what that dish was like, so we can treat it as 'not period'?)
>
>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"
>
>============================================================================
>
>To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
>Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".
>
>============================================================================

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