[Sca-cooks] originals and redactions, was "All the King's Cooks"

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Ranald wrote:
>       I think this is a very good point, and probably has a lot of
>bearing upon why my wife and I stand where we do, as opposed to most of
>the commenters on this list.  Working down hearth in period conditions
>is what I am most interested in.  Heck in the kitchen I used to work in
>I tried to light my fires properly (by the banked embers of the previous
>night hopefully or by flint and steel).  Most of my coworkers thought I
>was a loon and would happily toss in a match and maybe even an "easylite"
>brick!

Eeyuw!

I am hoping to purchase a West Kingdom fire pit soon. And i intend to 
get a flint and steel so i can learn how to light the fire. I imagine 
i'll spend a year learning how to build and maintain a fire, before i 
do much cooking. I grew up with two wood burning fireplaces in 
Northern Illinois and no sensible person would douse the fire with 
lighter fluid in their living room. However neither of my parents was 
very adept with the fire place (we only used it around Christmas 
time), and we children were not allowed to get involved, other than 
balling up newspaper pages and stuffing them here and their before 
the fire was lit. I think mostly the fires worked because of 
persistence on on my parents' part, owning some decent tools, and 
having well build fireplaces. No cooking in the library or living 
room, though :-)

>I like to experience the skills and environment of the past.
>Working in this sort of environment I think does change some of your
>attitudes in a very liberating fashion.  No timers, thermometers,
>tempeture gauges, measuring cups.

Well, when cooking things like pork, i feel like i need to check the 
internal temperature, but i don't use a thermometer for chickens... 
well, i have a thermometer that sits on the shelf of the oven, since 
you never know how close they really are to the temperature on the 
dial unless you do that. And feast cooking can get hectic. I was 
helping in a kitchen - but doing other stuff - when the chicken was 
very late - the oven was not heating properly and although the dial 
was set where it should, the oven was not running at that temp. But, 
as i say, in a feast kitchen, it can get hectic - you set the oven 
temp., stick something in the oven, and rush off the other things, 
coming back to check when it "should" be done or nearly so...

Lately i've been having my feasts cooked in large part off site by 
individual more experienced cooks, and then finishing on site. While 
it's certainly less stressful, i rather miss the wild circus of 
cooking a feast almost from scratch on site the day of the feast. I 
say almost because i've made dishes like horseradish sauces (German 
and Spanish), compost and pickles, and that really good reduced cider 
sauce that Brighid translated from Spanish at home ahead of time. 
Reducing that sauce took several nights.

>I do not miss the fire restrictions of living in Caid or the
>West!  In fact little I miss from out there save friends family and the
>lack of humidity!
Where are you now?

I'm from originally from Illinois, have lived various places (New 
York City, SoCal,), including outside the US (France and Indonesia), 
and traveled in places like Japan and Morocco. Northern California 
has felt like "home" to me since 1968, but i've wandered off from 
time to time...

>Where in the West do you live?  There may be a Living
>History Museum that can help you gain some time in a period kitchen
>though it is unlikely to be SCA period.

That's a nice suggestion, although i suspect i live in too urban a 
location to have this sort of thing nearby... i'm in the San 
Francisco Bay Area, East Bay.

Last summer my daughter and i drove from San Diego to the Bay Area 
visiting all the missions. They vary from extremely touristique (San 
Juan Capistrano) to a pretty good recreation of what they might have 
been like, minus the Indian slave labor (La Purisima in Lompoc). That 
was my favorite. It was in a fairly rural area and they did living 
history days... unfortunately we missed one the day before we got 
there. Usually they cook some food in the fire places and let the 
visitors taste. They also have a working black smith shop, actually 
raise animals and grow some food there, and have potters who make 
some of the dishes they use.

But i'll look around. One never knows what's lurking out there... 
There's a farm with living history days near the Dumbarton Bridge - i 
should check that out.

Thanks for the suggestion.

>  I have since learned that my definition of redaction was
>incorrect.  Figures!  I had never heard the word before it came up in a
>SCA context.  Never heard it in my non-SCA foodways experience.  I
>checked the OED the other day and the word's current use is specifically a
>text reproduction of process.  Important lesson here, learn the meaning
>of a new word before you use it? :)

Yeah, well, on this list (and in the SCA) we have our own meaning for 
words. We're not quite as arbitrary as Humpty Dumpty in "Alice", 
but...

So, "redaction" in this context means working up a (generally 
reusable) modern recipe from an historical recipe.

And "documentation" tends to mean documenting all the steps in the 
process of making something, including historical information about 
whatever it is, and including an organized and fairly detailed 
description of how we did it and why.

These are not necessarily the way these words are used outside the SCA...

Anahita