[Sca-cooks] Non-Europeans (mostly, but not completely, OT)

[El Hermoso Dormido]

On Wednesday 08 May 2002 11:14 am, Rosine wrote:
> (Actually, and I really do wonder this, why are more and more people
> choosing to be anything but a European - and yet still want to play in the
> SCA?
[...]
There are probably a few reasons, and I suspect you've hit upon at least
one of them - how many people who feel driven to "fit in" with everyone
else would join an organization like the SCA, after all?  I suspect we've
got a higher-than-average proportion of "individualist" types in the SCA,
which will tend to select for people who want to do something "different".
With the broadly-defined range that the SCA covers, it doesn't seem to
many people that stretching the geographic boundaries is much of an issue.

I suspect also that this trend is influenced by the fact that
as the SCA continues, more and more accurate historical information
starts becoming readily available to its members, and it becomes
apparent that there are a lot of "fringe" cultures (geographically
speaking) that had at least some contact and influence on European
cultures.  The notion of showing up at an event dressed up in a
Polynesian outfit has occurred to me (though I'm not likely to
ever ACTUALLY do it), since, after all, a lot of spices that
were very important to Europe (hey, look!  I've somehow managed to
make this thread relevant to cooking for a moment! :-) ) came from
the area, so I'd have at least as much excuse to do that as to
adopt a Japanese persona.  Or Aztec, Incan, Carribean native, or
east-coast indigenous American, for that matter, who were all in
contact with European culture, at least peripherally, in (late) period.

There's ALSO the fact that the SCA now EXISTS in places like Japan (and
has for some time, as I understand it).  It seems natural that people
living in Japan who are members of a historical society might become
fascinated by Japanese history, for example...

Finally, the SCA being, officially, an "Educational" society, it
tends to attract a lot of curious people (by which I mean "People with
substantial amounts of curiousity", though a lot of us fit the other
meaning as well...), who probably tend to rebel, at least a little, at
"boundaries" being imposed on their studies.

I'm guessing at some point the metaphorical pendulum will swing back, as
so many "rebels" adopt non-European personas that it becomes commonplace.
At that point, I'm guessing we'll see an upsurge of interest in comparatively
neglected subcultures in Europe (My Lady and I ran into a family of new
people at a recent event who were considering Pomeranian personae), which
ought to be quite interesting...

To actually bring this post back to the topic of cooking, I've gotten curious
- is there any substantial reference to feasts being prepared (presumably for
novelty) in a "foreign" style?  E.G. did the King of France, say, ever have
either his cooks, or cooks brought by a visiting dignitary, prepare, say,
a feast in the style of the Indians (That's India, not North America...)?