SC - help on documentation

[Edgar, Terry]

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?  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?

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?

Your learned wisdom is sought and appreciated.

Rivka