[Sca-cooks] Misha's Food question was: regional potluck)

[Philip W. Troy & Susan Troy]

Elizabeth A Heckert wrote:
>
> On Tue, 14 Aug 2001 16:00:47 EDT XvLoverCrimvX at aol.com writes:
>
> >FOod content:Does any one know if either pierozhki (Russian meat or
> >veggie filled pastries) or Chinese fried rice is period?
>
>    Firstly, is it a pastry dough or a pasta dough?
>
>     I ask because  Pierogi are big up here in southcentral Pa, Misha, and
> they're Polish.   They are noodle pockets that are filled.  Since a
> Pierogi is usually potato-filled, that definately puts it outside of SCA
> 'period'.

Pieroshki, in the form of baked turnovers, usually, IIRC, made with a
leavened bread-type dough, are mentioned in the Domestroi.

>    The problem you are coming up against is history vs. tradition.
> European cooking underwent a massive change after about 1600, for a
> variety of reasons; famine, Catharine De'Medici and New World edibles
> were only three of those reasons.  Then European and eventually
> world-wide ethnic groups emmigrated to the US.   This changed cooking yet
> again.
>
>     Now I realize that you know all of this!  But you have to consider
> that when someone is talking about a *traditional* dish, they are talking
> about a recipe that can be thousands of years old, but is often only
> about two hundred.  Why two hundred?  Well, a generation is often defined
> as about forty years.  That's five generations, or your great-great
> grandparent.  Because it is possible to have a great grandparent still
> living, transmission of the recipe in an original form is possible.  Past
> that, it's hard to say what happened to the recipe, 'cause our memories
> are faulty.
>
>     Why do I think *Fried Rice* is traditional?  Because there is a
> hundred year (on the west coast at least) tradition of Chinese
> restaurants in this country.  Stir-frying cold cooked rice may be an
> ancient technique, but what did the Chinese of the fourteenth century add
> to it?  I had a room-mate in college from Hunan province.  I learned how
> to stir-fry from her, and she got me to eat kidneys, and like it!  But
> was Hunan province always a home to spicy cookery???

Was it, in fact, always a home to stir-fried foods? I suspect not; see below.

> These are the kinds
> of questions you have to ask yourself about a *traditional* recipe.  The
> answers will have you concetrating on political history and archeology.
> And the problem with *that* is the Russian (sorry, I'm too old to
> remember the new names!) and Chinese tongues.  Most of your research
> materials will *Not* be in English!

True, there are comparatively few translated period Chinese recipe
sources, and a problem you may encounter, as I have, is that many
literate Chinese (with the exception, perhaps, of professional scholars)
feel that nobody but an extreme eccentric would have any interest in
really old recipes. Some of them aren't sufficiently proud of, nor
sufficiently interested in, their history, to want to decipher such
sources (especially when observance of not-so-old tradition is an easier
intellectual process, as with the man who not only disputed my claim
that chilies are believed to have been in China since some time after
Columbus, but tried to force me to recant on no evidence he could
provide), and then there evne some who consider such pursuits
counterrevolutionary. Which they probably are... .

On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to fall into a fallacy in
assuming that _because_ something is traditional, it is therefore no
older than a couple of hundred years, give or take a generation or two.
The concepts of ancient and traditional are not mutually exclusive.

What I can say is that neither of the two fourteenth-century Chinese
cookery sources at my fingertips (Ni Tsan's book and A Soup for the Qan)
appear to mention fried rice. However, both represent the recipes of the
wealthy or aristocratic, while fried rice probably developed as a method
of conserving fuel. It doesn;t take twice as much fuel to cook twice as
much rice, even when you fry your leftovers. The whole
fuel-conservation, quickly-cooked method is probably from the South,
where good firewood has been, for centuries, in comparatively short
supply, especially on the coasts. It's unlikely that fried rice
developed as a food for the wealthy, even though some permutations of it
are rather rich in their garnishes. However, this may be why we're not
seeing it figuring in recipe sources.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98