[Sca-cooks] Tips on Redactions

[david friedman]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
>The obvious place to start is try several
>medieval recipes that are already redacted/adapted
>be they from printed cookbooks or the web.


This is an old argument in this group, but I think that is just where
you should not start. For one thing, that means that you may end up
adopting someone else's mistakes instead of going to the original
source and figuring things out for yourself.

The following piece from the Miscellany represents my (and
Elizabeth's) view on the general subject of working from period
sources:

Cooking from Primary Sources: Some General Comments

One definition of what the Society is about is "studying the past by
selective recreation." Period cooking is one of the few activities
that really lets us do this, in a sense of "study" that goes
substantially beyond merely learning things that other people already
know. There are thousands of pages of period source material
available, and I would guess that most of the dishes have not been
made by anyone in the past three hundred years. As with many things,
the best way to learn is to do it; the following comments are
intended to make the process a little easier.

When working with early English recipes, remember that the spelling
has changed much more than the language and is often wildly
inconsistent; one fifteenth century recipe contains the word
"Chickens" four times-with four different spellings, of which the
first is "Schyconys." It often helps to try sounding out strange
words, in the hope that they will be more familiar to the ear than to
the eye.

Recipes rarely include quantities, temperatures, or times. Working
out a recipe consists mostly of discovering that information by trial
and error. You may find a modern cookbook useful in doing so. The
idea is not to adapt a modern recipe but to use the modern recipe for
information on how long a chicken has to be boiled before it is done
or how much salt is added to a given volume of stew. That gives you a
first guess, to be used the first time you try the dish and modified
accordingly.

It is sometimes asserted that real medieval food would be too highly
flavored for modern palates. Thomas Austin, the 19th-century editor
of Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, mentions a Cinnamon Soup as
evidence that medieval people preferred strongly seasoned food-but as
that soup is only a listing in a menu, this tells us more about 19th
c. English cooking than medieval English cooking. Our experience with
recipes that do contain information on quantities suggests that this
assertion is not true. For many years we made Hippocras, from the
recipe in Le Menagier de Paris, using about half the ratio of sugar
and spices to wine specified in the original, because otherwise it
came out too sweet for our tastes. Eventually Jeremy de Merstone
(George J. Perkins) pointed out to us that, while the pound and ounce
used in Paris in 1391 were approximately the same as the modern pound
and ounce, the quart was equal to almost two modern U.S. quarts-which
implied that, by modifying the recipe to taste, we had produced
almost exactly the proportions of the original, correctly
interpreted. The same conclusion-that medieval food, although hardly
bland, was not extraordinarily spicy-is suggested by our experience
with other recipes. One exception is a collection of dishes from 16th
century India for which we have ingredient lists with quantities but
without instructions; many of them turn out too salty for modern
tastes. I am told that the same is true of modern Indian cooking in
India.

Along with the idea that medieval food was overspiced one finds the
claim that the reason it was overspiced was to hide the taste of
rotten meat, due to the lack of modern refrigeration. We have found
no evidence to support that claim and quite a lot to oppose it.
Chiquart's description of how to put on a large feast, for example,
makes it clear that he expects to slaughter animals on site. Other
sources show medieval cooks as concerned with the risk of spoiled
meat and taking reasonable precautions to deal with it. Finally,
there is the observation that hiding the taste of spoiled meat does
not prevent the effects; a cook who routinely poisoned his employer
and his guests would be unlikely to keep his position for long.

Two reference books that we have found helpful are the Larousse
Gastronomique and the Oxford English Dictionary. The former is a
dictionary of cooking, available in both English and French editions.
The latter, which is also useful for many other sorts of SCA
research, is the standard English scholar's dictionary; it contains a
much more extensive range of obsolete words and meanings than an
ordinary dictionary. Also, Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks and Curye
on Inglysch contain glossaries.

An approach to developing recipes that we have found both productive
and entertaining is to hold cooking workshops. We select recipes that
we would like to try or try again and invite anyone interested to
come help us cook them. The workshop starts in the afternoon. As each
person arrives, he chooses a recipe to do. We suggest that people who
have not cooked from period recipes before do new recipes so that
they can actually have the experience of working directly from an
untouched original. Anyone who feels too inexperienced to do a recipe
himself helps someone else do one. The details of how the recipe is
being prepared-quantities, temperatures, times and techniques-are
written down as the dish is prepared. The afternoon and early evening
are spent cooking, eating, and discussing how to modify the recipes
next time. Many of the recipes in this book were developed at such
sessions. We have never yet had to send out for pizza.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/