[Sca-cooks] what are your thoughts on period-style food?

[david friedman]

>See, in my world view, slavishly copying stuff from period sources is a
>good way to learn, but once you have a reasonable understanding of the
>topic you can use your knowledge to make your own things in the same
>style.

I think the argument is about "reasonable understanding of the
topic." I'm not sure any of us have sufficient understanding so that
if we simply invent a recipe, limiting ourselves to ingredients and
cooking methods that they had, we can be reasonably sure it is the
sort of thing they would have made. Hence what we think is in "the
same style" may well not be.

My standard example is stew. What I think of as a generic stew is
meat, stewed in liquid, possibly thickened, with substantial amounts
of root vegetables--potatoes and carrots, say, in the modern context.
If you substitute parsnips for the potatoes, you have period
ingredients. And you also have the sort of dish that a lot of people
vaguely view as "typically medieval."

But as far as I know, there is no such recipe in the 14th-15th c.
English/French recipe corpus--which includes a lot of recipes. The
closest you come, I think, is beef stewed with onions.

I am also not sure what "slavishly copying stuff from period sources"
means, given the nature of most period recipes. You can't slavishly
copy quantities, temperatures or times because the recipes usually
don't give them. Given that fact plus the enormous number of
surviving recipes, it seems to me that it makes more sense to
exercise one's understanding on trying to do plausible and tasty
interpretations of period recipes rather than on inventing your own.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/