[Sca-cooks] Fwd: Cock-a-leekie soup reference

[david friedman]

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Gunther was asked about cock-a-leekie soup.

I remembered vaguely that we had discussed this before. When I went
looking, I found this old post of David's.
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At 1:15 PM -0400 6/9/00, Elaine Koogler wrote:
>I'll have to go looking for it, but I suspect that Cock-a-leeky soup
>is period...at
>least I believe it is.

I don't want to pick on Kiri in particular, since what she is saying
here appears in a lot of other posts, and conversations, in the SCA.
But "I suspect ... is period ... at least I believe it is" generally
means that someone else told you it was--and, in my experience, SCA
oral tradition is a very unreliable source of information. If you
encounter a recipe in the SCA or the mundane world and don't know
what period source it came from, your working assumption should be
that there isn't one.

This isn't limited to recipes. I have been in the SCA long enough so
that some of the traditional accounts one hears are of events I was a
part of--and that isn't how they happened.

Two things, in my view, are going on. One is  that verbal
transmission is a noisy medium. One person says "I think it is the
sort of thing they might have had in period," and by the third or
fourth person it goes through it has turned into "it is a period
recipe." The other is that, within the SCA, being knowledgable, both
about SCA history and about period history, is a source of
prestige--with the result that some people exaggerate how much they
know, and other people believe them.

Kiri also writes:

>Another possibility is to use some of the Norse/Viking recipes, if you have
>access to them.  After all, much of the northern part of Scotland
>was populated
>by folks from the Northern lands!

Unfortunately, we don't have any period Norse/Viking cookbooks
either, so that doesn't solve the problem.

After writing the above, I decided to see what I could learn on the
net about the history of cock-a-leekie. I found one page that said
the recipe was more than 300 years old, which would put it in the
seventeenth century; no source was given. I also found the following
assertion (about cock-a-leekie):

As early as 1598 Fynes Morrison recorded that it was served at a
Knight's house with boiling fowl (thus the "cock") and prunes.

Further search found the following passage from Morrison, which I
suspect is what is being referred to:

'I myself,' says the traveller Fynes Morrison, in the end of Queen
Elizabeth's reign, the scene being the Lowlands of Scotland, 'was at
a knight's house, who had many servants to attend him, that brought
in his meat with their heads covered with blue caps, the table being
more than half furnished with great platters of porridge each having
a little piece of sodden meat. And when the table was served, the
servants did sit down with us; but the upper mess, instead of
porridge, had a pullet, with some prunes in the broth.'--TRAVELS, p.
155.

If that is the right passage, what we have is evidence that Lowland
Scots at the end of our period sometimes ate chicken stewed with some
prunes. But that doesn't imply it was cock-a-leekie--for one thing,
there are no leeks mentioned.

On the other hand, the quote from Morrison does give a a little
evidence on Scottish cooking in period.
David/Cariadoc
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Elizabeth/Betty Cook