SC - Planning a German Feast

[Jenne Heise]

> My main reaction is that although some of these may be things you can 
> find period recipes for, almost all of them are things you can find 
> modern recipes for. So your diners aren't going to learn much about 
> period German food--they are already familiar with Bratwurst and 
> sauerbraten and apple strudel, assuming they ever eat in modern 
> German restaurants. It would be a more interesting feast if you 
> started by going through some period German cookbooks and tried to 
> get a feel for what their meals were like--including things that 
> aren't already familiar.
>

Well, I might suggest trying, if the idea is to give the diners an idea of
what period German food was like, doing some research involving period
menu resources and archaeological resources, etc. to see if those recipes
were typical or not.

Just because something is familiar to the modern audience is no reason to
disqualify it. For instance, both cabbage dishes and groats are considered
very typical  of modern Eastern European/Slavic ethnic cooking. If I left
them out of a Russian feast because they are 'familiar' I'd be cutting off
my nose to spite my face because they are apparently typical of period
slavic cuisine too.

Now, if there is minimal evidence for something familiar and lots more
evidence for something unfamiliar, that's a good reason to prefer the
unfamiliar... for instance, from what I can see, there's lots more recipes
for other things in the period Italian canon than there are for pasta, so
if you are gtrying to give your diners a sense of medieval Italian cuisine
you might want to avoid pasta and look at other things.
 -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker