[Sca-cooks] Question to the group....

[david friedman]

>Peasant
>customs change very little as a whole, so why should food be any much
>different?


>Kay

I don't know much about the particular case of Polish cooking, but I
find this argument unpersuasive.

Where we are in a position to observe changes in peasant cooking--for
example, in the case of the introduction of New World foodstuffs--it
turns out that it does change. Potatoes became a common food in a
variety of European cultures. So did tomatoes. So did paprika in
Hungary, peanuts in China. So your argument ends up as "in those
cases where we can check whether peasant cooking changes over time,
it changes, but we will assume that in  the cases where we can't
check, it doesn't."

I'm also curious as to how you know that "peasant customs change very
little"--when we are talking about centuries rather than decades.
Peasants adopted the horsecollar, the moldboard plow, the mantle and
chimney fireplace, ...  . Peasants changed from Catholic to
Protestant in some parts of Europe, and from Christian to Muslim or
vice versa in others.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/