[Sca-cooks] Period Foods: How to Fake It!

[david friedman]

>I’m looking a running a simple periods cooking 
>discussion at our 12th night (the feast of 
>fools) on how to do period lunches and off board 
>meals without needing to research recipes. 
>Bottom line, how to make it appear and even 
>possibly taste like period food without any real 
>work. Things like foods that can be prepped 
>ahead of time, stand up to travel and can be 
>eaten cold.
>
>To this end, for the fun of it, I thought I’d 
>ask the list, how have you faked it in the past. 
>What more modern recipes have you passed of as 
>period (looking) to make your life simpler and 
>table spread look more authentic? Before you 
>answer that, BBQ chicken for the grocery store 
>doesn’t count since whom here hasn’t done that 
>at least once. :-)

I find the question puzzling. If you are serving 
period foods that are commonly available 
today--apples, for example--you aren't faking it. 
If you are passing off modern recipes as period 
when they aren't then you are deliberately 
misleading the people you are feeding, which 
strikes me as a bad thing to do, or advise others 
to do.

I have made mistakes in the past--I used to serve 
honey butter, for instance, under the vague 
impression that it was the sort of thing medieval 
people would serve. But that was not a deliberate 
attempt to fake something, merely a mistake.

If all you want to do is to make it appear and 
taste like period food without any work--or at 
least, without any more work than if were not 
period--that's easy. Just cook easy period 
recipes instead of hard period recipes. It isn't 
as if you have to do the research yourself--you 
are free to leave the fun part to the rest of us 
if you really want to. There are, after all, lots 
of worked out period recipes readily available, 
including hundreds of them online.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/