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

[Philip & Susan Troy]

jenne at fiedlerfamily.net wrote:


 > Every year I think about teaching a mustard class, to offer an
 > alternative to dumping in packaged dijon, which definitely has
 > non-period ingredients.


Really? Just out of curiosity, which? (This is neither a loaded nor a
leading question; I honestly don't know.)


 > But my attitude about making mustard is 'we know what kinds of
 > spices were used. We know what other ingredients were used. Combine
 >  to taste.' And I think y'all would be bothered by that, and feel I
 >  was giving out misinformation and get annoyed.


I don't see that happening. If you said something like, "This is a
reasonable approximation of mustard for various times and places in the
SCA's period," I think most people would say, "Yeah, okay, fine,"
because that's exactly what it would be. If, on the other hand, you
said, "This is what period mustard is like, finito," I think people
might object to this as a generalization. It's not that the statement is
false, but it could be misleading for people who are more interested in
being told what is "period" than in actually learning about the subject.


 > On the other hand, if a cook says to herbalists that they cannot in
 > good conscience produce a lohoc of hyssop and horehound for
 > congestion and coughs and enter it in an A&S contest, because no
 > period recipe exists for a lohoc of hyssop and horehound... well,
 > I'll be very very peevish.

And rightly so, IMO. Luckily we just have nutty judges and no
kingdom-wide rules making such provisos. On the other hand, if I were
judging (and very likely the standards of other judges would be
different and even out the extremes of my own insanity), I would
probably award points for documentation as an educational tool, and if I
thought it was potentially misleading (i.e. no attempt to distingiuish
between an actual artifact and one which is more or less extrapolated),
I would take that into account.

See, what's important to me isn't so much that nobody should make stuff
that doesn't come from an actual, historical recipe, but that whatever
it is, it is presented in terms of what it teaches us about medieval
life. Suitably qualified, an extrapolated recipe can do that, but if
your made-up-recipe-based-on-years-of-research for mustard is simply
labelled "period mustard, djoo godda problum wid dat?", well, I might,
because it could lead to a spread of heresy ;-). And we all know how bad
_that_ is...


Adamantius, thinkin' about making some more cuskynoles
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98