SC - Re: theme menus

[david friedman]

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/