[Sca-cooks] Cooking with youngsters was Wow, a day of it's own!

[johnna holloway]

I know that there are lots of redacted recipes that are easy to do,
however we still lack illustrated step by step medieval cookbooks with
the glossy photo spreads of the made up dishes.
Very few of the medieval or historical cookbooks on the market have the
illustrations as found in Gourmet or Bob Appetit. The revised Great
Cooks and Their Recipes comes to mind as does Brears' All The King's
Cooks.

The three year old mentioned in the original post or for that matter my
son when he was that age are not yet at the stage where they can read
and understand a printed recipe on the page. A thick book with just a
few illustrations of medieval feasts from illuminations is not the same
as the juvenile glossy cookbooks that show step by step how to measure
and cut up ingredients. The final product is there so that they can
compare their dish to what the cookbook shows.

Imagine building a fancy gingerbread house with no illustrations or
pictures to guide one.

As to adults learning to cook before they tackle medieval recipes,
having guided a few roommates through initial lessons and having had
numerous conversations with cooks in the SCA over the past three
decades, I still stand by my advice. I have seen loaves of bread that
resembled brickbats; pie crusts that could have served for targets and
cookies that were more lead sinkers than edible. Yet we would turn these
people loose with medieval recipes prior to their being able to handle
simple by comparison Fanny Farmer or Betty Crocker. I have run across
some very inexperienced cooks such as the 30 year old who was the head
cook of a banquet featuring a large number of chicken dishes. I asked
why she was buying all the chicken in already cut-up pieces at expensive
prices (like $2.00 a pound) when whole chickens could be purchased for
29 cents a pound. She confessed that she had never cut up a chicken in
her life and didn't know where to start.

Johnna Holloway Johnnae llyn Lewis
---------------
Bronwynmgn at aol.com wrote: > Why, considering the number of easily
available medieval sources that have
> pre-redacted recipes in them?  I could understand it if there was nothing
> available but the originals with their characteristic lack of detail, but
> between what's available from Cariadoc and other SCAdians, and commercial
> books, there are hundreds of recipes that are now adapted to modern levels.
> I don't understand how these are any different than what you might find in
> Joy of Cooking, or Gourmet magazine.
> There's lady in my shire who described herself as having been "thrown out of
> lots of kitchens" mundanely, who is actually learning to cook by coming to
> redacting parties and working her way through the originals with help.  She
> has recently gotten brave enough to bring something she cooked herself to a
> potluck, which she would never have even considered before starting with the
> redacting days.>
> Brangwayna Morgan

> johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu writes:>
> > I am very traditional in that I think that children (and adults
> > for that matter) ought to be able to cook from a regular recipe and
> > follow its instructions before they are turned loose with medieval foods
> > and recipes.