SC - Platina Feast Bread Question

[Decker, Terry D.]

Bonne of Traquair wrote:
> 
> Before I'd cooked anything medieval, I was reading "to the Queen's Taste",
> or maybe the King's taste, I forget that detail.  There was an original
> recipe that cautioned to carefully cook the chicken without browning it.
> The recreated recipe gave instructions to brown the chicken well.  'Hmph!',
> I thought, 'I can do as good or better than this person at recreating
> recipes!  That's just blatently incorrect!'

While, in this case, it may be one of those dread "modern palate" issues
(where some well-meaning soul has decided, arbitrarily at times, that
people won't like the recipe as written), there will be the odd occasion
where some food has changed its basic nature at the market level, and
may not require the kind of treatment the recipe calls for. At other
times, it may require less, or in some cases, more processing. For
example, beef tripe used to be sold almost fully cooked; this was an
American and European standard, and if you follow some recipes from
earlier in this century that instruct you to cook it for half an hour,
you're in for some serious tooth exercise. Then there are the various
recipes that instruct us to clarify our sugar before using. Much of the
time we can proceed without this step.
However, that being said...
 
> Until, after multiple efforts, some sort of error in the original can be
> proven, assume any instructions in the original recipe are 'right'.
> Therefore, anything prevents you doing what the original says,  is wrong.
> If it says roll the paste, and you've got batter, then add more flour until
> you have a paste you can roll.  Don't worry about what someone else has
> worked out or advises, depend upon the evidence of your work.

Remember the bottom line. Published sources that attempt to adapt period
recipes for the modern kitchen are written by people whose ultimate
qualifications may be no more impressive than your own; they just went
ahead and did it. They are all 20th/21st century cooks trying to make
sense of an old recipe. Some may know more about actual cookery than
others, some may know more history or more about old manuscripts than
others, but none of them is a fourteenth-century cook, and none of the
decisions they may make are based on an intuitive understanding of the
period cuisine they're practicing.

I'm not trying to diss anyone here or elsewhere, just to show that
nobody really has any more reason to be intimidated by a period recipe
than anyone else, and that, yes, when in doubt, follow the original
recipe as written. The fourteenth-century author knows more about payn
ragoun than anyone alive today.
   
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com