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

[Philippa Alderton]

--- johnna holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
wrote:
> 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...

I tend not to think so, the reason being that while
fashions in animals change-fattier here, leaner there,
the basic muscle fibers of animals are structurally
the same.

> 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.

Yes, she/they have a point- we aren't necessarily
eating EXACTLY the same things that were eaten in
period- there are some differences- but I don't feel
that they're significant enough that what we eat now
is all that different from what they ate then. I defy
ANYONE, to tell the difference in breed between two
different cattle, for example, supposing they are of a
similar type, age, gender, background, and nurture,
all the Yuppie nonsense about the superiority of Angus
beef, to the contrary. Cow is cow, pig is pig, chicken
is chicken, and our minor modifications in body shape
and fat content in the past few hundred years are
nothing like the evolutionary changes across millions
of years. Muscle tissue is muscle tissue, regardless.

And, look at some of the "wild" species like deer. Yes
there are differences between American deer and
European deer, but they certainly haven't been bred
and modified as domestic species have, and the
breeding of domestic species is primarily cosmetic.

As far as plants go, it's perhaps a bit easier to
encourage plants of particular characteristics to
develop those characteristics, but unless there's a
major mutation ( and many major mutations are
non-survival) the changes we make are not in the basic
genomes, but in their expression. You need to keep in
mind that the _concept_ of selective breeding is
fairly new, and doing it consciously, other than
breeding your best to your best, to change the
characteristics, simply can't have changed things that
much.

Now, when you have something like the difference in
breads which may have caused the unpleasant texture I
noted in the Beef stew redaction, I'm thinking that
the different nature of the modern bread may have
caused it, but doing as others have suggested and
using a more "classical" bread might solve the
problem. While we don't necessarily have materials
that are exactly the same as medieval materials, we do
have materials with the same characteristics.

Or, at least, that's my thinking on the subject. "A
difference which makes no difference, is no
difference".

Phlip

=====
Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/