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

[Linda Peterson]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, johnna holloway wrote:
> 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]

This notion carries an underlying assumption that "Period Food" was a
discrete and uniform entity that did not vary from country to country
much less from town to town, year to year. It would be much like saying
it's pointless to cook some variety of ethnic food because we would need
to be in that country and of that ethnicity to do it right. Is Anahita's
Moroccan food going to be just like the lady who lives two streets off the
souk in Fez? No, probably not. But neither is that lady's food going to be
just like a similar lady in Tangier. That doesn't make it pointless for me
to try to make bastilla from a recipe book.

If I don't try to follow the recipe, how would I get -any- idea of what
the food was like? Just throwing a handful of cinnamon on a chicken pot
pie and calling it bastilla doesn't teach me anything. It just seems an
odd attitude.

Mirhaxa

  mirhaxa at morktorn.com