SC - Don't like Chocolate?!?

[CBlackwill@aol.com]

>There are many ways to make meatloaf. One of my cookbooks has three
>different recipes on the same page. You can use onions or not, tomato
>sauce or not, you can use hamburger or a combination of beef and pork,
>you can even put ketchup on top. And you can use breadcrumbs or oatmeal
>for filler.
>
>These illustrate a great variety of variations for what is in essence
>the same recipe (reminds me a little of bukenade and the 8 bazillion
>ways to make it!). However- these variations can't necessarily transfer
>to other recipes. For instance, you can use either oatmeal or
>breadcrumbs in you meatloaf. But you can't then turn around and use the
>meatloaf as rationale to substitute breadcrumbs for the oats in your
>oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Well, you could, but it would no longer
>be an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie! It would be something else and it
>doesn't sound all that yummy to me.

As an experienced modern cook you probably won't translate a substituion 
from one category of food to another. Substitutions in ground meat recipes 
don't translate to substitutions in cookies.  If you are missing an item in 
a cookie recipe, you look to other cookie recipies for advice.  But, when 
you are making turkey meatballs and breadcrumbs are required but not 
available, you wouldn't think it far fetched to sub. oatmeal as you learned 
when making meatloaf.  The finished product is still meatballs, other 
ingredients and the technique are more important.  You wouldn't substitute 
cornmeal, as you've never seen any evidence of that being a reasonable idea.

I agree we shouldn't substitute from modern experience because we are 
cheating ourselves of knowledge. But surely in SCA cooking experience and 
knowledge can be put to limited use and the ability to transfer a reasonable 
variation of ingredients in recipe within the same category will eventually 
develop.

How about all those bukenade recipes you mentioned?  Amongst them there are 
both mutual and exclusive ingredients. Doesn't the existence of these 
variations demonstrate that variety was accepted/expected in bukenade, 
within the range described by these recipes?  If the outside issues of cost, 
time, kitchen constraints or inredient availability can be solved by doing 
without something we don't have, and adding something that is listed in the 
other recipes, then why not? so long as the change is noted in any 
documentation or handouts.

Admmittedly, there aren't many such situations in which we have multiple 
variations on recipes.

Bonne




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