[Sca-cooks] Following a recipe...

[Stefan li Rous]

Cariadoc said:
> >Cariadoc wrote:
> >>  But the question came up, I believe, in the context of medieval
> >>  recipes. You can't follow a medieval recipe slavishly in the sense
> >>  you describe because it doesn't say how many minutes to cook anything.
> >
> >Actually, some of them tell you how many Ave Marias or Pater Nosters,
> >which is pretty close :)
>
> Are you sure? I don't remember seeing any of those in al-Baghdadi, or
> ibn al Mubarad, or the Andalusian cookbook.

Since I believe Cariadoc was in on the earlier discussions on this,
I suspect he is joking about this, not saying these phrases weren't
used for timing cooking.

However, within the Catholic cultures it would seem that the use of
these particular chants has an additional advantage over simply other,
perhaps local, chants. These would have been known over a wide area,
even if the native languages varied. Even if the cooks didn't know
Latin, they probably would still have been familar with those chants.

Cariadoc's comment does bring up another question though. Are there
equivalent Moslem phrases/chants that are called out like this in
period Islamic cookbooks?

--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****