SC - help on documentation

[Edgar, Terry]

Your line of logic stands.

Thank you for your input.

Rivka

- -----Original Message-----
From: david friedman [mailto:ddfr at best.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 1:45 PM
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject: Re: SC - help on documentation


At 1:11 PM -0600 10/23/00, Edgar, Terry wrote:
>Greetings!
>
>I need a little help regarding documentation.  Here is my delema. 
>
>First:  My grandmother taught me to cook.  Many of the things I make best
>are done without a recipe.  This has been handed down from generation to
>generation for a long time.   I must assume that most everyone in the
middle
>ages did not have access to cook books and cooked in this same way.
>Therefore, my question is this:  If I have a dish for which I can not find
>documentation but can find documentation to support it's ingredients, it's
>spices, the way in which it was cooked, etc.  Would this suffice as
>documentation?

That depends what you mean by "suffice." If you mean "would it make 
it acceptable as a dish in a feast for your group," the answer 
depends on the group; there are lots of places where dishes are 
acceptable not only without documentation but when they are obviously 
out of period. If you mean "would it get me a good score in an A&S 
contest," that again depends on the particular area, contest, and 
judges.

If what you mean is "is that a good reason for me to believe the dish 
is period, and justification for telling other people that it is 
period," then in my opinion the answer is "no." Think about the 
difference between "from generation to generation for a long time" 
and "more than four hundred years." A dish that was invented two 
hundred years ago would be seen now as having been handed down from 
generation to generation for a long time, and the odds are that the 
people cooking it would have no idea how many generations it actually 
was. Traditional old world cuisines contain lots of New World 
ingredients, which we know they didn't have until the sixteenth 
century, and many of which don't seem to have been in general use 
until after our period. Examples are tomatoes in Italian cooking, 
potatoes in Irish, and both in Middle Eastern.

And you can't solve that problem by simply eliminating dishes with 
New World ingredients, or substituting. That simply removes the 
dishes that are most obviously OOP, leaving whichever ones differ 
from period recipes in less obvious ways.

>   I would expect, for example, that there many ways to cook
>cabbage, not all of them listed in a cook book.  (this is a simple
>hypothetical example)  Take fried cabbage.  How I would make it: I would
cut
>up cabbage into small pieces, put it in a cooking pot with water, some kind
>of fat and salt. Cook it down until the water was cooked out and simmer the
>cabbage in the oil and serve.  Although there is probably a recipe
somewhere
>for this, I didn't get the above method from one.  So assuming there wasn't
>this exact recipe, but I could find documentation for cabbage, oil, salt
>water and cooking pot, would that not make it period?

We know that there was cotton cloth in period, blue dye, and brass. 
Does that make a pair of denim bluejeans with snaps and buttons 
instead of a zipper period?

Or in other words, my answer is again "no." A cuisine is not simply 
defined by its ingredients. Consider the difference between the meal 
a chinese cook would produce from the ingredients in a modern 
American grocery store and the meal an American would produce from 
the same ingredients. Different cuisines make use of the same 
ingredients in very different ways.

>Also, in mundania for example there are hundreds of ways to make potato
>salad.  It seems everyone makes it a little different.  Would this not hold
>true in the middle ages with the appropriate food of course?

Probably. It follows that there are probably period dishes for which 
no recipe survives. Hence the fact that we don't have a recipe for 
something doesn't prove it is out of period--just as the fact that I 
don't know that you are posting from Tasmania doesn't prove that you 
are not. But concluding from the fact that you might be posting from 
Tasmania that you must be doing so makes no sense. Nor does 
concluding from the fact that we don't know that a particular dish 
isn't period that it must be period.
- -- 
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/


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