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

[Elaine Koogler]

Ummmm......I wasn't proposing that we throw out the cookbooks.  I believe
that they are our guides in figuring out what kinds of foods were eaten,
along with, when we redact them and cook them, what kinds of tastes might
have been part of life at the time.  Your point about different cooks
preparing similar foods in different manners is quite well taken.  I think
this is particularly noticeable in the variants between the numerous
versions of blancmanger that are extant...along with the existence of a
fried spinach dish in both the Middle East and in Europe...same dish just
different oils and seasonings.

I am not advocating doing away with period recipes...in fact, I've really
enjoyed researching and redacting them over the years...and am ecstatic that
we have even more to play with!  I'm just saying that, as there was
interpretation amongst cooks in period, there should be room for some
interpretation here...especially as we already know that what we do is not a
faithful reproduction but simply our best effort to recapture an art that
existed hundreds of years ago.

Kiri
----- Original Message -----
From: "Linda Peterson" <mirhaxa at morktorn.com>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Cooking techniques- Was Funges Follies-


> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> http://www.ansteorra.org/mailman/listinfo/sca-cooks