[Sca-cooks] Following a recipe... rambling...

[AF Murphy]

When I think of following recipes, I think of the time, many years ago,
that I convinced my husband that he would have to take over the cooking
for a while. He could boil water, but not much more... I pointed him
carefully to my more basic cookbooks, and then suffered through a month
or so of inedible food. Kept trying to get him to look at the books, he
kept saying he did... Finally got him to sit down and discuss this.
Turned out, he was copying me, he thought. He'd never seen me actually
read a recipe in the kitchen, except for baked goods, and thought that
was the normal way to proceed. I finally convinced him that this was the
result of 8 years of daily cooking, and he had simply missed the first 5
years of the learning experience, during which I had followed recipes,
and learned, often by trial and error, what did or didn't work. Once he
started reading the recipe, he actually cooked pretty well...

A lot of it depends on experience, a lot on how much you already know of
a certain style, a lot on what you know about food chemistry, whether
you call it that or not... (One of my early errors, which he missed, was
the day I decided to hurry up a stew. At least, I was the only one
trying to eat the resulting marbles.) If I write a recipe for myself, it
is pretty sketchy. If I write it for anyone else, it has more detail, if
I write it for an inexperienced cook, I'll describe browning onions...

To follow a medieval recipe, from what I have seen, you need to know how
to cook. The problem with that, as we have mentioned, is that we then
bring our own assumptions to the kitchen. Even now, "cook until done"
means many things to many people! How do we decide what they meant by
it? Are we doing our own redactions, or starting with someone else's? I,
as a beginner, want to start with another's redaction. But if I do that,
do I perpetuate someone else's misreading, and miss the glorious
opportunity to misread it myself? We just had a discussion about
something that might or might not resemble rice pudding, depending on
who you read.

A while ago, on the Historic costume list, we had a thread about that
book we all want published - "Hey, Lady, Turn Around!" in which the
people in paintings would all cooperatively turn around, open jackets,
let us see lacings and underpinnings... Our equivalent is even harder,
because it would have to be fully interactive. "Sir, Would You Taste
This?" In which Real Medieval People, of various periods and places,
would kindly taste our concoctions, and tell us what they thought.
Bearing in mind that a 15th Century Italian nobleman probably had a
different idea of delicious food than a 10th Century Flemish farmer...
(Which do you think would have liked the jello mold? We can't even tell
you what all 21st century Americans like!)

I know I'm rambling, but this came up just in time for me to start
deciding where to start cooking. So it is an interesting question for
me. How do I know where to begin? How do I know if I am on the right
track? No, I don't expect answers to all these questions... *G* Even
from this group! But, do my questions make sense? How much are we
guessing, even when "following?"

I'm going to try Phlip's suggestion of trying medieval technique and
seasoning in everyday cooking. I don't know what some of these
seasonings taste like in these contexts, what some techniques end up
like. I have more time, now, and a chance to experiment. Now I just need
to decide what recipes to start with, find out what seasonings, etc.,
were, in fact used with what foods!


Anne


Gorgeous Muiredach wrote:

> I was using that as the starting point to explain what it means to me to
> follow a recipe.  Then throwing the idea out that we should discuss what
> following a recipe is.
>
>