SC - Mediaeval cookbooks to begin with
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Wed Mar 22 22:54:03 PST 2000
Various people are expressing opinions on how to start. My own view
is that it is more fun to start with the primary sources. After you
have played with them for a while, and formed your own opinions, you
can then look at what other people have to say.
This is one of the areas where it really is possible for the
interested amateur to get right to the coal face, as it were--in
contrast to all of the areas where people are used to taking X's
description of Y's summary of Z's research as gospel. One advantage
of doing it that way is that you won't start out taking other
people's guesses as facts.
When we do our cooking workshops, we try to make sure that the
novices get untouched recipes--ones we don't have a prior try on--so
that they can convince themselves, with a little help, that it really
is possible to start with a recipe written down in period, and end up
with something good to eat.
On a related point ... . I was in a thread in a kingdom listserve,
where someone asked why SCA lady knights didn't use "Dame," that
being the proper title. I asked whether there was any period evidence
that Dame was the proper title in period (as opposed to being the
modern English usage), and suggested several places (Ariosto, in 16th
c. English translation, and Spencer, both of which have fictional
lady knights) where evidence might be found. One or two people
responded to the effect that they had heard, or had read, that "Dame"
was the period title--as if that was sufficient. Nobody offered any
evidence. So far as I could tell, people continued in the thread on
the assumption that someone's third or fourth or fifth hand vague
memory was actually an adequate basis for an opinion.
David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
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