SC - Getting people to eat period food

[david friedman]

At 7:54 AM -0500 3/2/00, Siegfried Heydrich wrote:
>     No, actually, both are quite period. When you ask me for a recipe, I'll
>tell you how I make it. By and large, I don't document e-mail. I'm new to
>the list, I didn't know it was a requirement.
>     I've read descriptions of Frutti di Mar (though not by that name) in the
>writings of Homer and other classical authors.

Descriptions clear enough so that you can be reasonably sure you are 
making the same dish, and not merely cooking the same seafood? If you 
have notes on the descriptions, that would be interesting.

>     Bistec Ajado is another extremely basic dish - you take a tough cut of
>meat, pound the snot out of it, marinade it in juices that will further
>tenderize it, and pan/griddle fry it with onions & garlic. No complexity,
>and if you don't have one thing, substitute another. It's not exotic in the
>least. The stir fry is my own addition, as I love the flavors you get with
>the veggies when you deglaze the pan. Once again, I've seen numerous
>references to this style of dish in period writings. The recipe I gave is a
>method, not a formula, open to adaptation as you will.
>     As a rule, when I see a period recipe, I don't see a scientific formula
>to be replicated. I see a process, a method, and a list of things that taste
>good in this dish along with rough proportions, and that's when the artist
>takes over. Except in those dishes where proportions must be exact, I use
>the ol' mark 1 eyeball, an ability to judge flavors, and common sense when
>assembling a dish. If I don't have one thing, I look around to see what
>would be an acceptable substitute. And I experiment on myself before
>inflicting it on others.
>     I'm quite certain that's how it was done in period; you used what you
>had.

The problem with this approach is that we have been raised eating 
20th century cuisine, not medieval cuisines. So when we see a set of 
available ingredients, we interpret the alternatives in terms of the 
approaches we are used to, not the approaches they would have used. 
So if you start by glancing at a period recipe and then revising to 
taste, you are shifting what you are doing away from medieval and 
towards modern cuisine.

Let me take two of my favorite examples, both of which have been 
discussed extensively on this list in the past (as has the issue we 
are now talking about):

1. Roux. An obvious way to thicken a sauce, gravy, etc. is to stir 
flour into hot fat, add liquid, producing a suspension. There seem to 
be one or two period German recipes that do that. With that 
exception, the technique does not, so far as I can tell, appear in 
medieval cooking--although there are lots of recipes that thicken 
things. It seems clear that to the average cook in England in 1400, 
that simply was not one of the options--even though flour and fat 
were readily available.

2. Stew. Many people think of generic stew in the modern sense--meat 
cooked in a thick liquid with lots of root vegetables--as an 
obviously period sort of dish. So far as people on this list have 
been able to determine, there are no examples at all of that sort of 
dish in the surviving body of non-Islamic medieval recipes. The 
closest anyone has found is a stewed beef with chopped up onions--and 
no other vegetables.

>And I might point out that ethnic food in a
>culture going back for centuries, if not millennia, has at the very least,
>its roots in period cooking.

Everything has "its roots in" the past. Bluejeans have their roots in 
the past too, but that doesn't make them period.

We know that ethnic food changes, because it uses New World 
ingredients that were not available before about 1500. There is no 
reason to assume that it hasn't also changed in less obvious ways. 
Unless you have a recipe from 1400, or a very clear description from 
1400, of a modern ethnic dish, you simply don't know if the dish 
existed in 1400 or came into existence at some point thereafter.

>     That's where the art comes in. Consider Veal Marengo - we just won a
>battle, the boss wants a feast, I ain't got squat to work with, so let's
>fake it. We steal a calf, forage some tomatoes and mushrooms, got the basic
>staples, flour, butter, wine (yeah, lotsa wine!), and so was born a classic
>dish.

But we know that particular classic dish could not have been done 
that way in the middle ages, because they didn't have tomatoes.

>     If I'm doing a dish that's SPECIFICALLY period, I'll do the redactions
>and documentation. But for a feast, I use what's in my budget, what's
>available, and is as period in essence as I can possibly make it.

Fine. I'm not arguing that everyone should always do period cooking. 
I am arguing that you should not describe something as period when 
you have no reason to believe that it is. The discussion was of how 
to get people to eat period food, and your examples, so far as we 
know, are not actually period.

>It's way
>too easy to expend so much effort into making it 'period' that the 'good'
>part gets pushed to the side, which probably got all this broo-ha-ha started
>to begin with. I guess that's why I'm a cook, and not a Laurel<G>.

But there is no reason why making it period should interfere with 
making it good. The cooks who did the original recipes had to please 
the people who were eating their food too, after all. And they had 
far more constraints on availability than we do. So it is usually 
straightforward to do something entirely consistent with the original 
recipe, using your own ability as a cook to fill in missing 
information--details such as quantities, temperatures, and times. 
Doing that makes it more likely that you are making something they 
made than if you simply feel free to modify the recipe according to 
your taste, available ingredients, etc.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/