[Sca-cooks] Irish Housewives

[david friedman]

>The monastaries kept the books, and most people remained illiterate,
>if I grasp history well.  I'm not saying that there were no
>cookbooks, I am simply arguing that there is a lot more food out
>there than on the printed page.

I'm not sure anyone disagrees with that claim--in particular for
Ireland, where I don't think there are any recipes at all "on the
printed page" until 1600. Nor on the written page. The problem, as
discussed here many times before, is that we have some recipes we
know they did and an almost unlimited number of recipes that they
could have done--some of which they surely did, but we don't know
which. Select from the first group and (subject to various
uncertainties in interpretation) we know we are doing something done
in period, select from the second group and we don't know whether or
not we are.

>No one could eat the same thing night after night, well maybe broke
>bachelors on top ramen, but looking at my collection of cookbooks, I
>seem to think everyone craves a little variety.  If we know how they
>cooked as well as general practices in say England at the same time
>and add what was available, including eating utensils, you get a
>pretty good idea of what they could eat.

I'm not sure of the relevance of the first point--mostly the cuisines
we do have cookbooks from have lots and lots of different things. I
agree that one can do better than pure guesswork in reconstructing
from information other than recipes, but it I'm not sure how
confidently one can get from "what they could eat" to "what they did
eat."

>Yes, I cannot prove they made it, but I think the SCA allows us a
>little room for researched creativity.

The SCA allows people to do lots of things that are strikingly out of
period, as well as things that are somewhere in between. The issue
isn't what is allowed--it is how confident you can be that something
was done in period on the basis of the sort of indirect arguments you
are making.

>  > 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?
>Research involves lots and lots of paper.  Luckily there is a lot of
>information on that.  But it seems to me that a lot of the recipes
>recovered were from the same monks who were responsible for
>trancripting books. Not the average villager.

I'm puzzled--are you talking about Ireland? I didn't think any
recipes were recovered from period, monkish or otherwise. If you are
talking about the areas we do have cookbooks from--say French/English
13th-15th century--then the statement is clearly false. Off hand I
cannot think of any recipes we have that come from monasteries, and
certainly most of them don't. What we have are recipes written by or
for middle and upper class people--which may be the chief limitation.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/