SC - Mediaeval cookbooks to begin with

[Elaine Koogler]

Hi Elaina...long time no see!  Let us know if you ever get back to Atlantia.

I have to agree.  When I first started cooking in the SCA, the only book even
close to being a good period source was Cariadoc's book.  However, it was so
intimidating, especially as I didn't really have anyone to talk to or to show me
how to use/read/redact the recipes.  I started out by trying some of the recipes
in a couple of SCA publications ("How to Cook Forsoothly" and "In Service to our
Middles") which I had managed to pick up...and, until someone told me how really
bad it was, "Fabulous Feasts".  It really would have made life a lot easier if I
could have seen something like either of the two books we've been discussing
(Pleyn Delit and The Medieval Kitchen) to see how someone who really knows what
they're doing did it.  Once I felt comfortable with doing those...and expanding
them to feed a lot of people, I would then have moved to doing my own
redactions.

Kiri

Mary Morman wrote:

> Elaina takes a deep clensing breath and dares to comment on his grace
> cariadoc's opinion:
>
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, david friedman wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> there's certainly a lot of validity in that, and it's the way i started,
> and the way many "old" cooks started.
>
> > 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.
>
> but if you begin working with such excellent sources as heiatt or redon or
> santich you get not only the original text (admittedly sometimes out of
> context...) but the value of the decades of work these historians have
> done on textual and contextual research.  you don't have to take their
> work as "gospel" but it can help to take it as an introduction -
> especially with translations.
>
> i think the point here is to distinguish between a -good- secondary source
> (knowing the scholarship of the author, one that quotes the original
> recipes and comments on their translation, one that puts the original book
> or manuscript in context, one that comments on possible interpretations
> and presents their own as exactly that - an interpretation, etc.) and a
> poor secondary source (one that does not give original recipes just modern
> redactions, one that includes extraneous ingredients and leaves out
> unfamiliar ingredients, one where the author has not reputation of
> scholarship, etc.).
>
> Since this is my opinion, when someone asks me for an introductory book, i
> usually recommend heiatt, redon, or santich rather than a facsimile or
> reprint of an actual manuscript.  unless you have some knowledge of the
> context of what you are reading, it's too easy to get either lost,
> frustrated, or, worse, bored!
>
> elaina
>
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