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

[Decker, Terry D.]

> 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?
>
Peirozhki tend to use an enriched pastry dough.  Pirogi use a pizza style
bread dough.  Peirogi use a pasta dough.  Peirozhki are basically turnovers.
Pirogi are similar to calazone.  Peirogi are dumplings.


>     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'.

Potatoes are a modern filling.  There are a number of fillings for each of
the dishes some of which are quite appropriate for pre-17th Century.
Pirogi, for example, seem to be a way of using up left-overs.  All three
dishes were probably made in period (without potatoes).  The trick is
locating the documentation, some of which may be hiding in the Florilegium
from an earlier discussion.

> The SCA has
> a general guideline (although I think officially it refers to
> clothing)
> of pre-seventeenth century.

The pre-17th Century restriction appears in the Corpora without limiting
language, which means it applies to all aspects of the SCA recreation (not
just clothing).  In practice, because of historic errors in SCA
publications, the area between 1600 and 1650 is usually left as a gray area
in the recreation.  Also, early 17th Century writings of late 16th Century
contemporaries are usually accepted as primary documentation because their
origins are most likely 16th Century (Markham and Digby spring to mind).

   I don't stretch it to
> include any New World edible, even though there's a lovely
> bronze turkey
> sculpture in Italy that dates to the 1570's.

IIRC, there are turkey recipes in Rumpolt which Thomas Gloning has posted in
the recent past.  There is also a fair amount of evidence that North
American turkeys were being eaten in a number of places in Europe by the
late 16th Century, which we have thrashed vigorously earlier this year.  Our
limitation is in available, translated recipes.

>
>    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.

Giving reasons without some detail makes it difficult to determine the
validity of the argument and I tend to disagree with your choices, although
not with the underlying argument, which I might characterize as the
difference between "documentable" and "undocumentable" fare, rather than
"history vs. tradition".

I would argue that the major culinary change occurred in the 15th Century in
conjunction with the rise of the Renaissance, where there is a noticeable
change in techniques and spices.  Ras waxes upon this point quite elegantly
castigating "nouvelle cuisine."  I tend to think the initial change was part
of the ideological break with the Medieval past, and that the changes were
given impetus by a growing availability of spices and sugar.  The massive
17th Century change you envision may also be seen as the continued expansion
of an earlier change.

Famine was fairly common and does not appear to have much effect on culinary
techniques, just on survival.  In the 19th Century wide-spread famine,
particularly the Potato Blight of 1845, combined with inexpensive
transportation contributed to massive immigration from Europe to North
America.

Catherine de Medici's (1519-1589) influence was between 1560 and 1574,
during her regency and the reign of her son Charles.  Much of what is
ascribed to her is apocryphal, but she did alter French dining customs with
her parties and dinners.  Whether she actually altered French cuisine or
merely benefited from a changing cuisine is open to debate; however, the
change in French cuisine which manifests itself in the 17th Century culinary
texts almost certainly began prior to the 17th Century.

The New World foods are a mixed bag.  Some of them, such as turkeys and
sweet potatoes seem to have been adopted rapidly.  Others, such as the white
potato languished.  Those that were adopted seem to have been used in much
the same way the foods they were replacing had been used.

A major dietary change in the 17th and 18th Centuries is linked to inflation
(possibly from the influx of gold from the New World) which raised the price
of bread beyond the wages of workmen who needed it.  The need for
inexpensive food stuffs led to the widespread use of the white potato to
replace expensive grains.  The adoption of the white potato and subsequent
failures of the potato crop in the 19th Century led to waves of immigration
to the United States and the importation of European peasant cuisines which
have heavily influenced North American cooking.

>
>     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.
<clipped>
>
>     Elizabeth

A little quibble here, a generation is about 40 years by whose definition?
A generation is one degree in a line of descent, or the time between the
birth of a parent and the birth of a child.  In human biology, this is about
20 years, although some anthropology texts use 30 years.  What source uses
40 years?

Also, there are some dishes, polenta, blancmange and rastons come to mind,
that appear in a number of sources spread over time and distance.  These
could be considered "traditional" dishes, but they are well documented and
the differences in the recipes can be examined for changes over time.  Were
they changed by "faulty memory" or a decision to "deliberately improve" the
recipe?  Who knows?  It is an example of why I prefer
"documentable/undocumentable" over "historical/traditional."

Bear