[Sca-cooks] RE: Tomato evidence

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Diamond Randall:

>However, the peasant classes did not fall to the sucker tales of "poisonous
>tomatoes, bad humours of potatoes, fitness of maize only for animals" that
>the more incredulous noble class was prone to believe.  The common folk
>could tell a church by daylight and continued eating them regularly and
>evolved new cuisines using them.  As they were not written down, I feel
>that many of our documentation freaks go too far in insisting that these foods
>were not used in period to a significant degree.  This is very narrow and
>authoritarian.

That would depend on what statement is being made. Lack of evidence
is lack of evidence, and choosing to interpret lack of evidence as
evidence is logically faulty, no matter which way (conservative or
liberal) you choose to interpret it. I really don't think there are
vast armies of control freaks going around putting scarlet
"authenticity" A's on everything for which there's not a lot of
evidence, but which people like (such as tomatoes, for instance). I
do know a lot of people have consistently said, essentially, "We
really don't have a lot of evidence and so we really don't know for
sure. Maybe. Maybe not." The little bit of evidence we have suggests
tomatoes were eaten, but what's unclear is when, where, and by whom.

>   These foods show up in the 17th and early 18th centuries
>as significant cuisines.

True. However, just as an example, I STR Careme's recipe for brown
espagnole sauce (nearly every modern recipe calls for tomatoes)
doesn't call for them. I don't know what conclusion to draw from
that, except perhaps that we need to be careful of assumptions either
way.

I'm reminded of the [apocryphal] story of Charles Parmentier and the
introduction of the potato to France, or at least to Paris and
environs. Essentially the story goes that people would not eat
potatoes, would not, could not, not with a fox, not in a box, not in
a house nor with a mouse, etc. They had been grown ornamentally in
the gardens of the rich for years (we're talking early 19th century),
and Parmentier arranged for some to be planted in some urban
parkland, posting armed guards during the day, so no one could steal
the potato plants. At night, of course, the locals, surmising that
there were these wonderful plants so valuable that they had to have
an armed guard over them, climbed over the wall and stole the
potatoes. This went on for a while, until Parmentier noticed potatoes
growing in everybody's kitchen gardens.

Yes, this is just a story, and its reliability is questionable, but
it goes way back and directly addresses peasant (albeit urban)
attitudes toward a New World import.

>    I think there is just as much reason to assume
>that such productive and delicious food items were indeed in common use
>to evolve into a mature cuisine in the next centuries from common cookery.

There _is_ just as much reason to assume one as the other. Which is
almost no reason at all.

>After all, there is very sparse documentation of early use of native European
>fruits and vegetables commonly found and used since Neolithic times.
>However since they never made it into the (class limited) written word until
>quite late (or not at all), these are questionable as they don't exist as a
>recipe.
>Another documentation contamination is that so many of our so called
>authorities were written by so-called scholars (mostly northern European)
>who plagiarized quite regularly (like Gerard).  In the case of our great guru
>Gerard, he was a plant collector, not a cook, and tended to print any rumour
>he heard about a plant in other climes (e.g. look at his "goose barnacle
>tree").

You mean Marco Polo didn't really meet people with their faces on
their torsos???

We might look at some alternate sources for ideas. Gerard is
certainly one; while it's true he published some things that weren't
completely reliable, there was enough contact between his English
readers and various Spaniards (think of all the Spanish recipes,
possibly equally questionable, in Digby, for instance), that this
would be pretty easily confirmed. There's also an Italian herbal (I
forget the name, I am in desperate need of caffeine) from right
around the end of our period. Castel-somebody-or-other...

How about the Epulario? (I don't have a copy...) It was translated
into English either before, or not long after, 1600, and is plainly a
period, post-Columbian, Italian cookbook.

Hey, the lady could simply use Gerard's description, and explain that
she got the info from a slightly mad Englishman...

Adamantius

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER