[Sca-cooks] Re: ...thoughts on period-style food? (long)

[david friedman]

>    As very few of the existing 'recipes' have quantites, times and/or
>exact instructions, I look on it as an outline, if you will, of what
>the original cook intended the dish to be. The title is another clue -
>if it says Meat X with Sauce Y,  I would make it a thicker texture than
>if it said  Meat X in Y or just XY.  A stew for example - not
>necessarily with veggies, is a semi-liquid meat and flavor combination,
>cooked together;  a soup, or something to be served with sops or other
>bread product would be thinner; and a sauce would be the liquid cooked
>apart from the meat and served either over or with it, either thick or
>thin, based on the ingredients and the method of serving, if noted.

This is a bit risky, given that words change their meaning over time.
To take an extreme example, I believe Italian menus list pasta as a
soup--not because it is a soup but because "Suppa" is now the name of
a course and pasta is one possibility for that course.

Off hand, the nearest thing I can recall to a dish labelled "stew" in
the 14th/15th c. English/French corpus is "Beef Ystewed." I don't
think you can conclude from that that the original was "semi-liquid."

>   I cooked it up, writing down ALL the things I used and did (a hard
>thing - I usually cook by the 'some' method - some of this, a little of
>that, cook til done, etc), and typed it all up. Then I reverse
>engineered it, writing it as a recipe from that time frame would have
>been written, complete with eths and yoghs.  Then I gave it a title,
>with help from an old battered French-English dictionary, (Anglo-Norman
>influence, here) which referred to the way it looked, with the dark
>currants in a light sauce.

That sounds like a fun project. My only reservation is the risk,
given the nature of SCA oral tradition, that you will give a copy to
someone who will give a copy to someone who will tell all and sundry
that it is a real period recipe.

>    I DON'T cook the way they did in the ??century, but I would like to
>try my best to, someday.

Note that different centuries and places cooked differently, so if
you are trying to make your dish something that might have been made
in period, all the features ought to be from the same cuisine.

>Therefore, my food is not totally authentic, but I like to think people
>will enjoy eating it. And, after all, isn't THAT what we're trying to
>do ?  Get people to try something new and different;  erase the
>"..period food s***s.." mentality ?

That's one of the things we are doing. But of course, if the way we
do it is by presenting good food that isn't period as evidence, we
are deceiving them. Another thing we are doing is educating people
about what period food was like--and since an invented recipe is less
likely to correspond to what they actually cooked than a period
recipe, it does a less good job of that.

>    Our ancestors weren't bland boring people, neither was their food.
>It's up to us to re-create, and re-educate, thereby eliminating the
>Feast of the Yucch and introducing the Feast of the Yummy.

Yes. But that doesn't require us to change recipes, only to figure
out what they meant--given that they were supposed to be yummy.
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/