[Sca-cooks] OOP: Uzbeki Cuisine

[Jim and Andi]

Thank you! Actually, that site cleared up a major debate I was having...
that they use mung beans in that area. One of the  medieval dishes is called
pahet, it is a dish of "skinned pulses like mung, mash and lentils, ghee and
spices" but I've been using a modern recipe for "Dal Nawabi" which uses urad
dal. I tried the recipe with chickpeas, ful, and brown lentils and it tasted
okay but looked really awful and I was pretty sure they didn't have ful in
that area in period. I'll try a combination of the "Dal Nawabi" and the
Uzbek recipe with period spices and mung dal and see what I come up with.

I think that using modern ethnic recipes is very important. I did a LOT of
research on my Magyar and Polish feast using the Maria Dembinski book,
George Lang's Hungarian cookbook, and dating ingredients to the area. I
found I could not use cherries, paprika, sweet peppers, or certain methods
of cooking (I was doing a pre-Turkish influence cut-off) and that really
helped me to recreate medieval recipes. Were every single one of my recipes
redacted from a documented cookbook written before 1600, no way. But I was
confident that I was presenting foods the way they may very well have been.
You just have to look at the recipes very carefully, and know what
ingredients and cooking methods were used!!!

Madhavi

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org [mailto:sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org]
On Behalf Of lilinah at earthlink.net
Sent:	Saturday, January 26, 2002 11:17 AM
To:	sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject:	Re: [Sca-cooks] OOP: Uzbeki Cuisine

I've been reading even more parts of this site. The Uzbeks still use
fat tail in their cuisine, including in their desserts. Several of
the dessert recipes remind me of recipes from al-Baghdadi. There are
also quite a few interesting bread recipes. I think it might be
useful to compare these with the Medieval recipes... Many of the
recipes have rather Persian names, even though many Uzbeks are
Turkic, since, after all, parts of this region were part of the
Persian empire (just as significant parts of Afghanistan were
"Persian").

I'm not claiming that these are the same recipes, but again, it looks
like there is some continuity. Studying them might add interesting
considerations to some of those problematic recipes.

This, of course, like my post on Andalusi bread, raises a question:
When dealing with non-European cuisines, how valid do folks think it
is to compare Medieval recipes with modern "ethnic" ones, in order to
clarify them? Or should we re-creational cooks completely ignore the
modern corpus, as similar as some dishes may seem, and just fly
blind, ignoring what people in the same geographic locations do today?

Anahita
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