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

[bonneoftraquair at netscape.net]

Someone wrote:
>>  I
>>seldom seem to get quantities wrong, though, nor cooking times, because
>>I just kind of apply common sense and extrapolate from other dishes I
>>know well.

Well, you've cooked the dish to your taste and expectations, so of course the quantities and times are 'right'. Someone with more or less knowledge of the recipe in question may 'know' that you have acted with not the least bit of common sense.

My husband's first cooking skills were learned from a Chinese girlfriend.  He makes a lovely dish of greens he learned from her.  IN England, she subbed something he generically calls 'spring greens' for whatever she would have used in Beijing.  Here, he settled on collards as the best green for the dish. Everyone we've made it for has liked it, even if they hate collards.  My dad, who loves collards, HATED this dish.  Why?  Dad is a Florida Cracker born in 1939, and his common sense tells him that even if you leave out the fat back, collards should be boiled halfway to forever, not shredded and briefly stir-fried.  Extrapolation from his other leafy greens recipe knowledge confirms this: Except for lettuce in salad, greens must be well boiled.

SAy the girlfreind's grandmother thought up this particular dish.  It has has been interpreted by the grandmothers daughter(in-law), re-interpreted by the grandaughter in another country, then re-interpreted by a boyfreind of another culture within yet another country/culture. This dish is likely something the original cook would, at best, think is interesting, but not her own. If she tasted a dish of greens cooked by my husband, she could easily think he's got no common sense of how to treat greens, or even what greens to choose for the dish. And that's only 3 cooks away in a direct taught-at-the-stove lineage from the original.  And guessing that grandmother is likely about the same age as my dad--even the two of them from the same 'era' aren't going to agree on what is common sense for greens.

So, the problem is, when has one learned enough about methods, ingredients, taste and texture preferances of a particular time/place in history to make up dependably 'period' recipes on the fly? Cariadoc has been studying and cooking from documented recipes as long or longer than anyone on this list, and I don't beleive he finds himself up to that order.  Two people have worked at translating a specific text--and researching methods and ingredients as possible--but I don't think that, for public use, they'd bypass the recipe collection to make something merely resembling those recipes.

I think most people here concatenate from several documents when working up a 'redaction'.  Some people see this as creatively varying from whichever version they somehow see as primary (because it was the first they found, the most clearly readable,or actually being the oldest extant version.)  Others see reading all those other recipes as research but still think in terms of cooking from the single recipe. Either way, it's an acceptable way to come up with a recipe the cook may say is "based on recipes from time and place", which will be shortened by everyone else to 'period'.

Applying methods and ingredients knowledge to create a dish certainly has every chance in resulting in a dish that people think is a good combination of ingredients.  However, whether or not this dish resembles a dish derived from the concatenation or research methods above is dependent on a lot of factors that can't be known by most of the people eating the dish.  HOwever, if it's served at an SCA function and has the mereist hint of historical basis, everyone else will call it, and think it, just as 'period' as the above case.  This is why 'the list' doesn't much like this method of feeding and teaching the populace.  Entirely too likely for someone who doesn't know much, if anything, to get a dish fixed in people's minds as 'period' that isn't anything like correct. I beleive Cariadoc has examples of his early work, tha he now considers less than correct, but that come get referred back to him as correct.  (others also, I use His Grace's name as example only, and hope he does not mind.)

Unlike a costume, the dish-to-be-eaten only exists for a short time, so comparisons can only come from the written down 'redacted' recipes and the supporting commentary about similar recipes and reasons for any assumptions.  I think going back after the action, confirming and documenting the facts you were working from is harder than starting from the framework of a document and adding to it.

Bonne de Traquair
Gylldenholt, Caid

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