[Sca-cooks] Beef noodles and sour cream

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

From: Philippa Alderton <phlip_u at yahoo.com>
>Well, this is the problem with serving modern dishes
>at SCA feasts. You're not the only one who, seeing
>something served at a feast, thinks it must be
>medieval.

Indeed.

>I am unaware of any similar dish in the European
>corpus of recipes, although Mongols and Huns might
>well have mixed milk and meat. Certainly Jewish folk
>wouldn't, and considering the strong resemblences
>between the Arabic/Moslem dietary laws, and the Jewish
>Kosher laws, it would be unlikely for them also.

This is actually not the case. Muslims have no trouble eating milk
and meat together. The similarities between Muslim and Kosher laws
that i am aware of are having the animals "ritually" slaughtered
(there are religious requirements besides health requirements),
slitting the throat, draining the blood, and not eating certain
creatures.

But there are even more differences. Kosher laws separate foods into
two basic categories, as does Muslim law - permitted (kosher /
hallal) and forbidden (treif / haram). But these categories, while
both including some of the same animals (both forbid eating pork,
birds of prey, and carrion, for example), are rather different.
Kosher law additionally forbids eating critters that live in water
that don't have scales. The Muslim law is much less stringent, and,
as far as i can tell, allows the consumption of all sorts of seafood.

Additionally Kosher law goes much further than Muslim law in
subdividing the permitted foods. Of the allowed foods, there is (1)
the meat category and (2) the dairy which cannot be eaten together in
one course, although there are some interpretations that allow them
to be eaten in one meal, if eaten in a particular order and separated
by at least one other course (if i recall correctly), and (3) foods
that can be with either of the other two, such as eggs, and, i think,
fish. The terminology used for these divisions is usually Yiddish,
rather than Hebrew.

Muslim law doesn't subdivide the food. There are dishes of lamb with
yogurt in the sauce, chicken cooked in milk, etc. And traditional
Muslim food service basically brings out all the food at once - not
that this is always done, as there has certainly been European
influence on food service in some parts of Dar al-Islam. So the meat,
the dairy, the dessert, the vegetables, etc. all can conceivably
arrive together.

Anahita