[Sca-cooks] Researching....

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/24/2001 10:47:24 AM Eastern Standard Time,
mneumark at hotmail.com writes:

<< One of the reasons I am asking this is in order to create new recipes using
 period techniques and ingrediants.  As part of the "creative" part, I figure
 it is reasonable to come up with new recipes, or is this a no-no in the SCA?
>>

This is one of the big debates we get into here on a regular basis.  It
really depends on how you want to handle the concept of something being
"period".  For a lot of people, myself included, if I am going to say
something is "period", it has to be directly following the written period
recipe as closely as I can - no changes, no substitutions, nothing.   If I
change something in it, or try to come up with something that I think follows
the patterns of medieval cooking, I describe it as being "in a period style"
or something similar.  And I rarely if ever use something that I invented for
anything other than a family meal or maybe camp cooking.  I'm not going to
put it in one of my feasts and have someone assume that it is an actual
period dish.   I don't have the extensive background in study of period
recipes, period health concepts, and period culture that  would allow me to
have any chance of actually creating a recipe that a period person would
think had been created by one of their own cooks.
Similarly, I don't see the word "creative" in our name as having any special
significance in how we do things.  The name of the organization was thought
up on the spur of the moment to reserve a park for the second tournament and
had no significance at all at the time.  Some people will argue that it has
acquired significance over time and should allow us to experiment in creating
new "period" things, but I don't agree.  YMMV.

Brangwayna Morgan