SC - Definitions and Examples: Period, Peri-oid and OOP

[Decker, Terry D.]

For our purposes, the term period is a rather sloppy generality, when one
considers "period" can cover all of Europe (or even most of the world) over
approximately 1100 years.  With that great a span, any blanket statement
based on limited fact  can create a logical absurdity and is almost certain
to be in error.

A original, historical recipe is a fact.  When we translate the recipe and
try to precisely follow the instructions to create the dish, we are
attempting to recreate a period dish, or more correctly, we are attempting
to recreate from a stated source which comes from a specified region and a
specified time.  There is no guarantee that we have accurately prepared the
dish, but it is as close to the original as we can make it.  The less of the
original we have to work with, the greater our margin of probable error.

When we deviate from the historical fact (the recipe), the dish is not a
historically accurate recreation.  It is our version of a historical recipe
and is therefore a modern recipe emulating a historical or period recipe.
What we call "perioid" for short.

in your example, whether or not raw fruit was eaten in period is not a
question of "period" or "perioid," but of historical accuracy.  What
references to the practice of eating fruit raw or cooked are there?  When
and where do these references occur?  Is there any clustering of references
to suggest a preference at a time or place?  What are the contemporary
medical practices involving fruit?  

BTW, the little bit I have seen regarding fruit suggests that cooked fruit
may have been more common than raw fruit.  While the references tend to
prove fruit was commonly cooked, they do not disprove fruit was eaten raw.
However, in terms of historical accuracy, we know more about cooked fruit
than we do about raw fruit and our presentation of cooked fruit is likely to
be more accurate than our presentation of raw fruit.

In simplifying the roast beef argument, your conclusion misstates the facts.
The question is not whether roast beef was served in period, but how common
was the practice and how was it actually prepared.

There are a number of medical recommendations across the centuries which
specify that beef should be boiled.  Platina, for example, has instructions
on how various meats should be cooked, but no instructions on roasting beef
I can remember.  Markham, a 150 years later, discusses roasting meats and
provides instructions for preparing and basting beef roasts.

Charlemagne's contemporary biographer whose name escapes me at the moment,
stated that Charlemagne preferred roast beef but that his physicians wanted
him to eat it boiled, which is in accord with the known medical practice.
Considering how strong willed Charlemagne was, I suspect he enjoyed his
roast beef.  What we don't know is how that roast beef was prepared.  How
was it basted?  What herbs and spice did the use?

Markham tells something of how beef roast was prepared for Elizabethan
England, but does that have any bearing on how beef roast was prepared in
Carolinian France?  With an 800 year cultural gap, probably not.

To be historically accurate, we must say roast beef was eaten in period, but
until very late in period we have no idea how it was prepared other than
being roasted.  The widespread medical advice on beef was that it should be
boiled and a number of recipe collections seem to bear this out, which
raises the serious question of how common was roast beef compared to some
form of boiled beef?  For which roasted meats do we have recipes, and do
they follow accepted medical practice?

Now, I am going to serve roast beef at the Protectorate feast.  I am going
to follow Markham's up to a point for rather than spit roasting, I will oven
roast and I will add some savory herbs to the baste.  The result will be
"perioid," but as my goal is verisimilitude over absolute accuracy, that
will suit me.  For those who are interested in historical accuracy, I will
note how I deviated from Markham in the recipe notes.  Were I doing a
Carolinian feast rather than an Elizabethan one, the beef might be boiled.

My goals are not to just recreate "period" recipes, but to place them inside
a historical framework and support my opinions with facts appropriate to the
time and place.  Not authenticity to an ill-defined "period," but
historically accurate within the limits of my scholarship.

Bear


> One of the problems with saying 'it's not period unless we 
> have a complete
> recipe" is that you are using the term period in a way that 
> is far more
> specific than the way in which a the general scadian would 
> understand it,
> and it leads to logical absurdities. For instance, even if we 
> could proved
> that they ate raw [insert fruit here], we would be defining 
> raw [insert
> fruit here] as not period, but merely periodoid. Furthermore, the
> collective intelligence of this list seems to claim that we have no
> recipes for plain roast beef, as opposed to made dishes of 
> roast beef. To
> claim that roasting beef is therefore not period-- given other sources
> mentioning roast beef-- is to step into the dark world of SCAdian
> Authenticist Myth.
> 
> Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      
>