[Sca-cooks] Does anyone know anything about this book

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> The impression I get is that these dishes are somewhat tweaked from
> their original sources in order to make them more convenient for
> traveling and for camping events, much in the way you can get recipes
> for dishes to be eaten at Scout Camp that in various ways diverge from
> what you'd ordinarily be eating. Makes sense, hence the name.

Well... um. I bought it hoping for recipes that were suitable for camping,
dayboards and potlucks. I'm not sure what their criteria were for making
this judgement, because I didn't find the recipes in it particularly
useful for these purposes.

> I think there may also be a tendency on the part of the authors to
> assume that any recipe that can be tweaked (and renamed) to resemble a
> common modern dish is a positive step. To some extent I agree with
> this, in that it tends to minimize or eliminate the alien factor of
> some period food, and possibly allow more people to react with openness
> rather than xenophobia.


I'm wondering if the authors bothered to redact the originals as written,
before tweaking, or whether they just 'adjusted' based on their
perceptions of wierd. For instance, the wine-and-almond-milk onion sops,
as written are much less wierd than the cow's-milk onion soup with bread
that they made out of it.

(Well, yes, I do like sops *grin*)

On the other hand, having a selection of recipes in one place that have an
index (why DO so many period cookbooks have such lousy editing? indexes
are a GOOD THING, and so is putting translations/redactions WITH the text
being translated/redacted.) So I've been looking at the originals in the
book with an eye to redacting them myself.

-- Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika   jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't
change can't learn." -- Terry Pratchett, _Lords and Ladies_