SC - OT Vegetarian Vampires (was Absinthe)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Another thing to consider is the fact that some of the immigrant Asians
we encounter here in the USA can tend to have a different view of
history. For some, it is not a subsistence issue and therefore interest
in it is kind of a whimsical thing. For example, the lady that was
recently mentioned as having gotten a recipe from her great-grandmother,
who got it from hers, etc., therefore the recipe would have to have been
over 500 years old. To some people, there's no problem with the logic of
this, and in many social situations there's no need to be any more
logical or specific than that. Then again, there's my mother-in-law,
whom I've asked on occasion to help me find Chinese recipes from prior
to the Ming Dynasty (since my wife isn't fully literate in written
Chinese), and her response has always been, "Why, for heaven's sake,
would you want to know about that? This is the 20th century and those
people are all dead."

Heaven forfend, though, that one of her children or grandchildren should
fail a history test in school... ;  ) 

Adamantius, still trying

lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> Morgana wrote:
> >I am a bit
> >curious why you think there aren't period sources for these cuisines.
> 
> I think what people mean, and they've said this explicitly before, is
> that there aren't sources available that we can read *easily*, not
> that resources don't exist.
> 
> If you don't already know that sources exist, it's often hard to
> track them down when their titles in library catalogs are often just
> Romanizations of the foreign languages in question - i'm sure this is
> true also for Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines.
> 
> We are more likely to be familiar with European languages than Asian
> languages. Besides speaking and reading French, and being able to
> make my way through a number of other written European languages with
> dictionaries, i can speak Indonesian, and read it, but only in the
> Roman alphabet - i can't read Javanese or Balinese or Batak written
> in various writing systems derived from Sanskrit.
> 
> I suspect that on this list, there's a high number of people who can
> at the very least read one or two languages other than their birth
> language - and we have quite a few here whose native language is not
> English. We are blessed by their presence. But i suspect non-European
> languages, especially those that do not use the Roman alphabet, are a
> bit less well represented.
> 
> Anahita al-shazhiyya
> who will be taking classes on reading and speaking Arabic
> at our Kingdom Collegium in a bit over a week...
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- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com