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

[david friedman]

>The question isn't about proclaiming an item to be period when it's 
>not but fooling the eye and taste to give a lunch or off board table 
>the feel/look of period. When people as you tell them what it is, 
>that way they can see that it doesn't take that much effort or time 
>to trying to make a table feel/look more period.

But you are teaching them that the limited time and effort they have 
should be put into faking it instead of doing it for real. Why?

To take the argument one step further, what do you mean by "feel/look 
more period?" If someone isn't doing period cooking he probably 
doesn't know what period food would be like, so what he ends up doing 
is making the table feel/look more like what a 21st century person 
imagines period food to be--thus reinforcing whatever errors his 
diners already have. And if someone is doing period cooking, than 
making the meal period is no more work than faking it--probably less, 
since it avoids the difficult problem of figuring out what modern 
things are period in look/feel. We already know period things are.

This is related to the common SCA practice of "documenting" a recipe 
by first taking a modern recipe, then finding some grounds for 
claiming it corresponds to a period recipe. If you do it honestly 
it's a lot more work than starting with a period recipe, since you 
are going to have to go through a lot of period recipes before you 
find one that fits--if you ever do. It's rather like ordering out for 
pizza by dialing phone numbers at random until you find one that 
turns out to be a pizza takeout place.

And in practice the temptation, since you know what answer you want, 
is to do it dishonestly--to find some recipe that with sufficient 
effort can be misread to have some similarity to your period recipe. 
For a horrible example, see C.A. 79.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/