[Sca-cooks] Cooking techniques- Was Funges Follies-

[johnna holloway]

In order for food chemistry to be the same now
as it always was, wouldn't the foods have to be
exactly the same? And as they say... there's the rub...

Elizabeth David certainly didn't feel that modern
foods were the same. She wrote that "The reproduction
of dishes cooked precisely according to the recipes
of a hundred or two hundred years ago is a fairly pointless
undertaking, not only because our tastes, our methods
of cookery and our equipment have so totally changed
but because even the identical would no longer taste
the same." [An Omelette and A Glass of Wine, p287]
There are a number of other food historians and critics
who share the same views, including John and Karen Hess,
among others. I believe that this is why most would
preface their attempts at historical cookery with the
words using "modern ingredients." Few of us have access to the
meat from rare breeds, the flour from the right variety
of wheat or other grains, the heirloom fruits and vegetables,
the raw unrefined sugars, the dairy products from the
rare breeds, etc. And that's before we turn to the techniques
and methods of hearth cookery over open fires and bakeovens
fired by wood.

Johnna Holloway   Johnnae llyn Lewis


Catherine Hartley wrote:>
> I have always thought that amount of ingredients people redact with is based
> on their own modern palates and modern concepts of food chemistry. However,
> despite being called different things on occasions, food chemistry is the
> same now as it always was. We just may apply chemistry differently in many
> situations as compared to period cooking, but not neccessarily in as few as
> one might think. I also think that despite the influx of new ingredients and
> spices (and removal of some more toxic ones), spicing tastes, if one has an
> open mind, isn't really all that different. snipped---
> Caitlin of Enniskillen