[Sca-cooks] Girl Scout Demo

[Christine Seelye-King]

One of the Mom's in our group has three girls that are in Brownies/Girl
Scouts.  She signed them up for an activity camp this week, with a 'Middle
Ages' theme.  She asked for volunteers to come out and help during the week
nights.  We went last night, and had a good time.  I took the "Old World/New
World" game, and it was a big success.  The girls had about 10 minutes with
me, and I got groups of about 15 at a time.  We talked about the map, what
was "old world" and what was "new world", and then I had them each pick up
one of the food items and we talked about each one and where it might have
come from.  Aside from guesses like 'the green beans can looks old, so it
must be from the Old World', and 'Where does chocolate come from?' 'It comes
from cows!' (- oh, man, the power of advertising), they did pretty well at
it.  The most amazing part came when I got out "Take a Thousand Eggs or
More", and had volunteers read the modern Gingerbread recipe, and then take
a stab at the original.  To my surprise, most of the girls did really well
with the early English.  The lady from our group commented that since they
were all stressing phonics in school nowadays, they were used to sounding
out words that may not even look like the proper words at all, to get used
to reading phonetically.  I said 'They're being trained to read early
English texts, how wonderful!'  I said "How many of you have heard some
Shakespeare" (the majority of them raised their hands, I was pleasantly
surprised), "Well, trying to read these early recipes is like having someone
read your Mom's "Joy of Cooking" like it was a Shakespearean play".  This
got lots of impressed reactions from the girls and Moms alike.  One of the
Mom's got a hold of my cookbooks and started copying recipes down like mad,
I think we've got a potential convert there! ;)
	Christianna