[Sca-cooks] Ein gefulten kuchen

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 02:25  AM, bruniquel wrote:

> Maybe the "fish" reference is a red herring... if you leave it out you 
> could (sort of) end up with something that might be cake-y...

Could be. On the other hand, maybe the potato in potato pancakes, or 
the carrot in carrot cake, might be omitted to get something that more 
closely resembles a modern cake. Granted, this kuchen doesn't mention 
fish in its name, so the analogy is somewhat exaggerated but still not 
completely inappropriate.

See, while the inherent weirdness (or any perceptions thereof) of an 
ingredient in a recipe does not, in itself, preclude the possibility of 
scribal or translator's error, neither does it confirm it. What it does 
do is force us to at least accept the possibility that a medieval 
German person's idea of a cake might be very different from ours, or 
that a "kuchen" might have originally had little resemblance to our 
modern concept of a "cake".

Another example of the kind of thing I mean would be a typical medieval 
English crustade, later, in theory, to become our modern "custard".

It may or may not be named for the crust, but it generally involves 
little or no sweetening for the eggs or egg yolks. Some variants 
include no other dairy products, and both cheese and bone marrow are 
common additions.

Yet we all know, today, that a custard is almost invariably milk or 
cream thickened with eggs or egg yolks, and almost invariably 
sweetened. Quite often vanilla is involved, and frequently there's no 
crust at all.

So, when adapting a medieval crustade recipe, the question then 
becomes, "to what extent is it necessary to tweak this recipe to 
resemble a modern custard?" Do we assume the bone marrow is a scribal 
error, even though it appears in 47 different versions of the same 
recipe, or that it is a red herring, because we can't imagine marrow in 
custard? Or do we try it, acknowledging the perpetual possibility for 
error on various levels, and see what we can learn, in this qualified 
sense, about medieval food habits? [It's actually good. At least until 
you have that heart attack ;-).  ]

Sometimes the closest and most accurate interpretation of a period 
recipe that we can achieve is what it _might_ be.

Adamantius