[Sca-cooks] food as art

[Mark.S Harris]

Rise J. Peters said:
> I had a friend in grad school ask me for "a home cooked meal" once.  So I
> treated him to slow-cooked porkchops in gravy, home-fried potatos, and
> southern style green beans.  He looked at the plate and then at me and said
> "It's all brown."
>
> It had never occured to me that food should be any color other than brown,
> before that...

Okay, while not much of this is close to period (do we have any
period recipes for pork chops?), the color is not unlike a lot
of bruets and such. Except that green beans are green, not brown.

Just how could such a meal be dressed up? And which of these methods
might have been used in period? Yes, you could substitute something
like squash, being yellowish for the green beans, but let's say
that those are the types of food you have and can't substitute
for. You could add onions to the beans, and onions were often used
in various foods in period. Would they perhaps have garnished the
plate with some dried berries? Or is that also still a dark color...

Would they have perhaps used a light colored sauce instead of
the dark gravy? If so, which would go with the pork chops?

Stefan li Rous