[Sca-cooks] Irish Housewives

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Mór Dhàna:
>Being a housewife and cook, I like to think that I'm not so
>different from all the other centuries of the like.  There are a lot
>of recipes that are in my head because I have made them so often.
>Many were passed down from my grandmother and before.  Seeing as how
>much of medieval Ireland was illiterate... I don't imagine the day
>to day meals being written down for posterity.

They appear not to have been, but then Ireland was a society whose
literary tradition was more or less oral until, approximately, the
Dark Ages. But then, since Ireland seems to have been the repository
of a lot of ancient wisdom while a lot of books around the rest of
Europe were being destroyed, that may not be the issue.

>   Each house or village had a garden and animals which they used to
>prepare simple foods.  When I mentioned knowing the history of an
>area, I meant knowing the cooking methods and use of materials.  I
>am of the belief that it can still be pretty darned authentic even
>if you don't have that scrap of paper telling you that so in so in
>such and such a century ate it.  What did you have for dinner last
>Tuesday?  There is no substitute for research, though, and i think
>that we sometimes get too stuck on the literate side of our
>ancestors.

Last Tuesday, I had baked chicken with homemade
raw-onion-chili-cilantro salsa, achiote yellow rice, cucumber salad
and blanched broccoli. I must be missing something here... Wife and
child had some ice cream, I did not. No, I didn't make a note of it,
but I do remember.

Okay. How do you know about the history of the area in question? Did
it involve books, or was it entirely free of the stigma of scraps of
paper? Also, compare Ireland to, say, England or France, places whose
culinary literature goes back comparatively far. There have been,
over the centuries, significant changes to a lot of country dishes.
Provencale pissaladiere (an oniony, olive-y, fishy pizza, and very
yummy, too), which is very old indeed, possibly Roman-Empire era, was
originally made with, and named for, pissalat, a salty,
garum/halec-type paste made by salting tiny, fresh fish. Today, and
for the past couple of hundred years, it seems to have been made with
tinned or other salted anchovies. French housewives have been making
it with anchovies for quite a long time, but what we don't know is
why the shift occurred. It could be a completely spontaneous shift,
it could have to do with the extinction of a species of fish, who
knows? There are probably French housewives who are absolutely
_certain_ that the dish has been around forever and that it was
always made with anchovies.

My brother-in-law, whose family came from the area around Shanghai,
once became very offended when I suggested that chiles and other
capsicums are American. He knew they weren't, because his mother
cooked with them, her mother cooked with them, etc., and therefore
the chile pepper has been known in China since the beginning of time.
I told him geneticists and paleobotanists agree that they are not
indigenous to the Eurasian landmass, that no known fossil evidence
exists to indicate their presence, and that they contain genetic
material found in no other Eurasian plants, so unless the Chinese
themselves brought them back from the Americas long before Columbus
(a possibility), they would not have cooked with them before 1492.
They also don't seem to occur in extant herbals and other Materia
Medica texts of the time and place. But since my brother-in-law knows
for sure that his mother's dishes go back to Peking Man or earlier,
none of this matters. Otherwise, it stands as proof that the Chinese
were in the Americas long before Columbus. Never mind, further, that
medieval Europeans traded for quite a few spices that originated in
and around China, but not chiles. But this doesn't stop him from
knowing that the old traditions of his family have not changed over
the centuries.

Sometimes it is extremely hard to know why or where a change in a
traditional dish will occur. Do we know what Irish colcannon (which
is probably at the very least medieval) was like before the potato? I
don't. All I know is that it is believed that the name refers to "the
white of the leek".

Certainly I could omit the potatoes (in fact, I have, and it's good)
or I suppose I could add barley groats or oatmeal, but apart from
knowing this is a _potentially_ accurate historical variant, how
would I know whether it was accurate? I would have a hunch, is all.
And on those occasions when I've done such things in an SCA context,
I've identified these hunches as exactly that. Hunches.

I don't believe anybody (not even Cariadoc!) suggested that there was
anything wrong with speculating, or even intuiting (I believe this is
not a verb, but I seem to be outvoted by most of the human race) on
our culinary past, but remember that the definition of history
involves the written word. But speculation should be identified as
such, especially by those of us, myself included, who are pretty
proud of our abilities in that area.

>Sorry for the rant, but I have a touch of the irish temper ;)

_That_ was a rant??? My dear young lady... the ice in my drink
remains frozen. And my family's largely from Limerick... ;-)

Adamantius