[Sca-cooks] Re: Icelandic chicken was Japanese

[david friedman]

'Lainie wrote:

>  > I do have a food question though, and it may be semi-related. What's the
>>  deal with presenting dishes as 'foreign' when they really aren't? Icelandic
>>  chicken, which isn't Icelandic, is the example that immediately comes to
>  > mind.

and Johnna Holloway/Johnnae replied:

>I think this was so named because it
>came out of "An Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany"
>which is what the article was entitled back
>in 1931. Once titled that way, the name has
>stuck.

I'm afraid that one was our fault. The recipe was from the source
Johnna names above, and had a title something like "how to cook
chicken" (in Latin), which wasn't much use in referring to it. We
published our worked-out version in (I think) the first edition of
the Miscellany under the name Icelandic Chicken, back before we knew
about the other versions of that cookbook and the conclusion that the
book was probably southern European in origin.  If I remember
correctly, we cooked it for one feast in more recent years and called
it "chicken in paste", which is a more accurate name, but I doubt it
will ever be able to displace "Icelandic Chicken".

You have the choice between not publishing until you know all about
it, or publishing what you think you know and eating some of your
words later.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook (most of a month behind the list)