SC - Re: period Norse
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Sun Mar 5 20:13:05 PST 2000
At 6:51 PM -0600 3/5/00, Branwen wrote:
>And if Norweigians had potatoes in period, it's *probably* period. Lefse
>doesn't seem to be a new thing!
Potatoes come from the New World, so while it is not impossible that
someone in Norway grew them sometime in the 16th century, it is not
very likely that they were the basis of anything widely eaten.
I think the general argument implied by your "doesn't seem to be a
new thing" is wrong--simply because four hundred years is such a lot
of time. Consider potatoes in Ireland, or tomatoes in italian
cooking, or paprika in Hungarian cooking. All of those are New World
ingredients which could not have been used before the 1490's, and are
unlikely to have been common until after our period. Yet all are
central elements of the cuisine, which most people simply assume have
been there forever. Similarly with coffee in the Islamic world--not
from the New World, but a new introduction near the end of our
period, and again something that most people who know a little about
the Islamic world in recent centuries assume has been there forever.
Hence, even if lefse were not made out of potatoes, I think your
"probably" should be no more than a "might be."
David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
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