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

[Kirrily Robert]

lilith wrote:
>
> 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."

Yeah, but there's somewhere in between as well, where you might say "OK,
I know that there are a number of recipes for certain types of meat cut
up small and stewed with fruit and flavoured with certain common types
of spices, sharpened with verjuice or vinegar and thickened with bread
crumbs or almonds.  I've seen examples with X, Y and Z types of meat,
and the sorts of fruit used are often P, Q and R, and the spices tend to
be things like L, M and N in certain combinations," then making a stew
based on that.

> -- 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.

*nod* ... I think you're right about the distinction between
"creativity" and "adaptation".  There's a difference in motive, mostly.
But I've seen people get huffy about adaptations for vegetarians, too.
*shrug*.  Those people, to be blunt, can bite me.

> 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).

*nod*, I think that's what I was trying to say above.

> 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.

You've reminded me of a silly thing that happened at an event in Lochac
once upon a time.  There was some small A&S competition occuring, and
there were a lack of entries in a certain category, so the A&S judges
went to some people and said "quick, do you have anything on you that
you could enter, just to make up the numbers?"  One Laurel among them
(though I think it may have been before he was made a peer) rapidly put
together a "peri-oid" sculpture: a spoon stuck handle-first into a loaf
of bread.  He grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen and documented it
thusly: "Medieval sculpture.  They had bread.  They had spoons.  They
*must* have stuck one in the other at some point, therefore it's
period."  The competition thereby had enough entries, and the story went
into the metaphorical books of oral history.

Yours,

Katherine


--
Lady Katherine Rowberd (mka Kirrily "Skud" Robert)
katherine at infotrope.net  http://infotrope.net/sca/
Caldrithig, Skraeling Althing, Ealdormere
"The rose is red, the leaves are grene, God save Elizabeth our Queene"