[Sca-cooks] medieval Japanese [food] for the total novice..

[Jones, Craig]

>From: "Diamond Randall" <ringofkings at mindspring.com>
>
> >Since I tend to focus on Northern European and 15th century and earlier,
>this
> >is a bit out of my area :-)  Can anyone who has been working on Italian
>Ren
> >cookbooks and other similar sources point me to any info about tomato
>usage
> >that I can pass on to her?  Even if it is simply a notation that Italians
>ate
> >them, or something, that would be useful.  I am not expecting to find
>much,
> >but any guidance anyone can give would be appreciated.
>
> >Brangwayna Morgan
>
>It was years ago when I also was looking for mention of use of new world
>foods
>in Europe, that I came across numerous mention of potatoes, turkeys and
>maize in ALL of the southern European nations.  Unfortunately at the time,
>I did not have access to the period sources cited in the articles and books
>that
>supported these claims.  Like you, I relied on Gerard and other easily
>accessible books.  The jest of these uses was that these foods were
>initially
>very popular with everyone who had access to them, but as they spread
>northward
>into Europe, various "authorities" made statements and rumours about how
>unhealthful or
>inappropriate these foods were or that they were only fit for the
>peasantry.
>As such, they declined in popularity with the nobility quickly and failed
>to
>slip
>into documentation in the (noble class) cookbooks then evolving.
>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.  These foods show up in the 17th and early 18th centuries
>as significant cuisines.   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.
>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").
>If such documentation was to be believed, the extreme food recipes of
>highly socially competitive nobles has been taken to some extent as normal
>as it was written down.  How narrow minded!
>I believe you have to make judgement calls on this as applicable to SCA
>feasts.  The lack of data and general unavailability of exact fruit and
>vegetable
>varieties and the differences of cooking apparatus and materials make any
>attempt at a real period recipe problematical (in most cases).  E.g., does
>cooking in an aluminum vessel make it taste different from cooking in a
>period
>iron and copper vessel seasoned from previous use?  I say YES!  I can taste
>the difference in colas in aluminum cans and plastic.  Likewise, the foods
>that are extreme like larks tongues or dormice in honey, I tend to discount
>as "normal" except in very specific instances.  Speaking of honey, as a
>beekeeper,
>I know that the taste and appearance of honey varies widely. Of course the
>honey you get on supermarket shelves has been processed to a fare-the-well.
>Unless you can get raw unfiltered honey from specific sites in Europe,
>uncontaminated
>by pollens and nectars of foreign post-period plants, you cannot say you
>are
>being authentic either.  So much for dictums from our annoying purists.
>To recap, I think you should use tomatoes and new world foods without guilt
>as long as you have taken the research to discard recipes which are
>post-period
>and have very specific dating of their origins.  I think it is in reason to
>use
>these introductions from the new world as long as you rely on a simple
>"folk"
>cuisine and do not make any claims that these are anything but very late
>period
>approximations and not absolute.
>
>Akim Yaroslavich

...um..hit a nerve Akim???...come over here..a hug and sympathy may make it
a little better..care for a cup of tea..or a glass of wine??
Olwen

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