SC - questions

[Jenne Heise]

> 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. 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'")?

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"