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

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Lady Katherine Rowberd wrote:
>Anyway, it got me thinking about period-style food.  See, I get the
>impression that many people on this mailing list are pretty strict
>about documentability.  In many opinions, one should always strive to
>use period recipes rather than making up "medieval-ish" dishes.
SNIP
>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.

Well, most period recipes are damned hard to follow slavishly as they
usually don't give quantities of ingredients and sometimes the
methods of preparing and cooking are pretty vague or even unclear.

Give three cooks who believe in follow period recipes as closely as
possible, and they're likely to come up with three different dishes.
Now, depending on what recipe they're starting with, they could be
pretty close, or they could have some rather different
interpretations - viz. Cuskynoles.

So, even strictly working with period recipes requires a great deal
of creativity.

Now, i confess i've "cheated" a few times:
To make Apple Moyle/Mus i compared five 15th c. English recipes,
looking for similarities and differences, then made my own. I did
basically the same thing with the Char de Wardons. Anything that all
the recipes included i included and i didn't add anything that wasn't
in at least one of the recipes. Was what i made period or peri-oid? I
don't know. I didn't follow one single recipe, but the originals all
had the same names, were all from the same country and the same time
period, and yet they were all different.

For one's own dining one can make up one's own things. but don't tell
folks they're period.
For example, i've adapted period recipes for vegetarians,
substituting tofu or seitan for the chicken. I consider these to be
adaptations of period recipes, but, in my opinion, they weren't
peri-oid, as in the places the recipes originated there was no seitan
or tofu.

Again for example, i've taken several similar, but still different
recipes, and made my own "concatenation" of them, because there were
elements of each i like and elements of each i disliked - i have also
made the recipes as they were. These were for my own eating, shared
with some people i was camping with. I would not present these
concatenations as "period", but they were, in my opinion, peri-oid.

However, we could argue about just how peri-oid these were for a
while. None the less, it's only period if it is as close as possible
to the original.

Then Gorgeous Muiredach wrote:
>It's not that I find period recipes bad, I just find I have a problem
>following a recipe in general.  I much prefer to use the recipe as an
>inspiration than anything else.  Of course, if I'm cooking "period", then I
>don't throw in extra ingredients and do my best to follow the technique
>provided.

Most period recipes are pretty vague. Other than many (but not all)
Arabic recipes and 16th century English recipes, few have quantities
of ingredients, and as i mentioned above, the techniques can
sometimes be open to interpretation, even in the Arabic recipes. If a
dish is cooked in a crust or a coffin, was this an edible or an
inedible crust? Not always easy to know. So a cook using a period
recipe has to be a bit inspired.

It isn't merely a question of not adding non-period ingredients.

I have seen somewhere on the web a recipe which the cook says was
her/his interpretation of extant Compost recipes. What the cook in
question made was cooked carrots with a spicy sauce. This doesn't
look much like an interpretation of a Compost recipe to me. Compost
is a type of pickle or preserves (or even chutney). It isn't a fresh
vegetable with a fresh sauce. To me this goes beyond interpretation
or creativity. This is just wrong.

However, there are plenty of recipes that just say to season with
good spices. I ran into this with some of the German recipes i used -
Marx Rumpolt tended to be especially vague. I was making a root tart
- and there were no other recipes for root tarts, so what i did was
look over other German recipes for root vegetables and select from
the spices mentioned there. Is this what Rumpolt would have used? I
have no way of knowing. I was doing my best to be period, but... So,
was this period or peri-oid?

I know i cook certain dishes quite differently from some other
people. We are all trying to be as close to the original as we can,
and yet the finished product looks and tastes rather different. Who
is correct? Are we all "period"?

Anahita