SC - Re: theme menus
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Sat Feb 10 10:05:41 PST 2001
At 3:16 PM -0800 2/10/01, Vincent Cuenca wrote:
>I've been discussing this same topic with Ras on another list; the
>general consensus I've been finding among the "experts" (Revel,
>Scully, Santich, et. al.) is that there was a lot of recipe trading
>going on. Revel identifies recipes in Taillevent from "Forme of
>Cury" as well as some German and even Muslim Sicilian ones. De Nola
>has French mustard, Genovese tart, and a whole slew of German
>bruets. The "mig-raust" in "Sent Sovi" shows up in Platina as
>"Mirause" and de Nola as "Mirrauste". Everybody and his brother has
>some variation on blancmange. Even if you work from one source, you
>may end up doing the same sort of mix-and-match you were trying to
>avoid in the first place, since they were apparently doing it back
>then. Nobody actually says "I got this recipe from X manuscript"
>(except for Platina maybe, but he's a rare fellow anyway), but it is
>possible to trace provenances.
Sure. You even get things in common between al-Andalus and Mughal
India (we have one in the Miscellany). And _A Soup for the Qan_
points out the links between Persian and Mughal/Chinese.
But in each of these cases, you know that all the dishes were being
done in a single time and place, even if some of them originated
somewhere else.
You get the same situation with stories. One of the medieval Islamic
stories I like to tell has a chunk in it which also appears in the
Canterbury Tales. There is another that closely matches a Welsh story
and (I think) also an Indian one. One of the more famous works of
Islamic literature is an Arabic translation of a Persian translation
of a Sanskrit original.
- --
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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