[Sca-cooks] RE: Tomato evidence

[Diamond Randall]

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>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

--- Diamond Randall
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