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

[david friedman]

Anahita writes:


>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.

Have you tried looking for the period equivalent? The Andalusian
cookbook has a variety of "vegetarian fake meat" recipes. There's
nothing wrong with what you are doing, of course, but the alternative
might be more fun. And you might end up with a tasty version of
counterfeit Ahrash of Garbanzos, something I haven't yet managed.

>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"?

I think the mistake is in treating "period" as a yes/no category.
There is a sense in which nothing we are doing is period, since our
guesses filling in the blanks might be seriously wrong, and our
ingredients are in various details different from theirs. There is a
sense in which a modern spaghetti dinner is period--protein,
carbohydrate, and fats, just like they ate. So the relevant question
is how close an approximation to a period dish we think we are
making. Sometimes the closest approximation isn't very close, given
limited information.

One of our standard problems along these lines is ibn al Mubarad. He
gives essentially no spicing at all--and very short recipes. It isn't
clear whether he is describing a much simpler cuisine than the other
Islamic cookbooks or just leaving out all the inessential details
which he expects the reader to fill in. Generally the first time we
do one of his recipes we do it straight, the second time we spice it
based on the closest recipe we can find in al-Baghdadi--often a
recipe of the same name.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/