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

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa wrote:
>The attitude is such as to quash any kind of general theoretical
>construction of food along period lines. Unfortunately, I'm not into that.
>If I have in hand 7 or 8 recipes for a fairly straightforward item, like
>mustard sauce, pepper sauce or cameline, and I have the general SCA cook's
>understanding of medieval cooking, spicing and ingredients... I can make
>some fairly educated guesses about producing a mustard, cameline sauce or
>pepper sauce, and I would then say it is _based on_ recipes x, y and z but
>NOT a _redaction_ of recipes x, y, and z.
>
>Further, if I know that a grain porridge was produced with grain X in
>period, but I don't have a recipe, then I go look at a bunch of other
>recipes for other grain porridges and produce a porridge of grain x based
>on these grain porridge recipes x, y, and z. Still not a redaction.
>
>If I have a boid of some kind, and I don't have a recipe for boids of that
>kind in that period/place, I can look up recipes for cooking boids and try
>to determine how to cook it in a similar manner. It's not a redaction.

Well, we're on the cusp of "is it period or "peri-oid?". I'm
basically on your side (see my other post on this topic about Apple
Moyle/Mus and Char de Wardons). However, making a sauce based on
knowledge of a number of existing recipes for that sauce, as you
mention, is rather different than taking some sort of meat and mixing
in a bunch of ingredients that were used at some point in time and
claiming it's period - something you are not advocating. What you are
doing with the bird is what i call "adapting" a period recipe. That's
different than saying, "well, they had turnips and parsnips and
carrots and beef and onions and spices (to borrow Duke Cariadoc's
example), so i can cook them all together and have a period dish."

>On the other hand, I've seen some real creativity exercised in so-called
>redactions. (Randomly remove/add/change spices, change to vegetable broth,
>etc.)

I consider some adaptations necessities, rather than grave breaches.
-- I change from meat broth/stock to vegetable stock in all my
non-meat recipes. Other than that, i cook the dish as in the original
recipe. I consider this an adaptation, so the dishes i make will be
suitable for vegetarians, rather than "creativity". There's no way i
can cook batches of food for some unknown number of vegetarians
separately from what i cook for the omnivores.
-- Additionally, in recipes that call for lard, i generally
substitute some other fat, especially if the recipe suggests the
possibility, so that some unknown number of semi-Kosher diners and
vegetarians can eat the food. For example, they couldn't eat the two
pork dishes in the Boar Hunt Feast, but i used butter instead of lard
in the Cherry-Rice recipe so they could eat that.

Then there are the recipes that just say to use "good spices",
without specifying which ones. A cook has to use more than good sense
or good taste. A cook has to do some research - look at other recipes
in the corpus of that time and place and see what spices they use in
similar recipes, if they exist, or in recipes with the same main
ingredient, if those exist, or recipes for a similar but somewhat
different main ingredient, as i did for the Root Tarts from Marx
Rumpolt i made at the Boar Hunt.

I view what you hypothetically and maybe actually did with your
"boid" to be this sort of thing (since you didn't mention whether or
not this sort of bird is one you know was actually eaten in that
time, at that place).

On the other hand, i don't think i'd call some of what i've seen
"creativity" or adaptation, such as the case of the carrots with
spiced mustard sauce that were being produced with the claim that the
dish was Compost.

Anahita