[Sca-cooks] An Evil Thought- Excercise in Intelligence

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Heleen Greenwald:
>Ok Phlip,
>It's 1:46 a.m. and I can't sleep.... not enough brain cells working.... can
>you please explain what you're after? Sounds like it would be fun... but I'm
>clueless right now as to what you want.
>signed, Phillipa the clueless!!

I gather the idea is to find period justification for serving such a
dish at an event.

It's probably that Minds of Dubious Quality Think Alike. Some years
ago, on this list, there was a long stretch of dish descriptions
along the lines of "I left the cheese out because some people are
lactose intolerant and the pork out to accommodate some people's
religious convictions and the rue out because too much is toxic and
the almonds out because I think maybe the queen is allergic to them
and the eggplant out because I hate the stuff so I substituted
pears," leaving a "period" dish so unlike its original inspiration in
virtually every respect that it would have been wiser to simply
choose another dish more suitable for the purpose and requiring fewer
changes. I believe the word we're looking for is "travesty"?

In response I wrote and posted here a redaction for a beef pottage
recipe (I don't recall if it was an actual period recipe or one I
made up), and it included wholesale changes as in the account above.
As I recall it involved pre-chopping the beef instead of parboiling
before chopping, forming it into a patty to facilitate portion
control instead of stirring the chopped, cooked beef into the
pottage, leaving out the almond milk for allergy considerations,
cooking it on a grill instead of boiling it because who ever heard of
boiling beef anyway, then adding chopped onions (lightly fried or raw
since boiled onions -- eee-ewwww). Served it with gratuitous mustard
(not even I could work in ketchup), possibly garnished with ye
Pickyll de Cowcumbers, y-leched, and all served between two small
trenchers (cut from manchets, to be sure) so the King could eat it on
the go between order meetings.

We also decided it would be great if it could be wrapped, say, in
paper or parchment, maybe colored yellow and bearing the stylized
heraldic "M", looking kinda like twin gothic arches, of the household
steward's name. Which, if I remember correctly, was listed as Master
Ranulf Mac Duinall. That way even the plate wouldn't need to be dealt
with, and His Majesty wouldn't need to worry any of the help about
cleanup. Oh, an if (th)ou wollt hav (th)e yfryes with (th)at...

I could be wrong; this was years ago, but I'm pretty sure the last
straw for me was a well-known, popular redaction (Is it in
"Travelling Dishes"?) of a medieval pottage recipe (I think it was
chicken boiled and served in a sweet-and-sour sauce) affectionately
known to hundreds, possibly thousands, of SCAdians as Medieval
Chicken McNuggets. It was also probably inspired by the popular (at
least in the SCA) recitation, possibly originally generated by Master
Richard the Poor of Ely, entitled "For To Make a Floffer Notter."

This whole rant of mine, at the time, was about the need to
responsibly educate the people who eat our feasts (those of us who
cook them). While some changes are both necessary and not
problematical, we do need to be aware of the message it sends about
medieval eating habits, and make sure that the message we send is the
message we intend. Which is not, I suspect, that Chicken McNuggets
are a Secret Period Food that Cariadoc is trying to hush up.

Basically, there are two ways to educate people about period food.
One is to show them what it was, by producing examples (or be willing
to talk about it), and the other is to show them what it was not (as
best as can be determined). If you've been forced or otherwise have
chosen to produce a non-period dish, or change a period dish until it
no longer resembles period food, that's okay, but you should be
prepared to explain that your choices were not necessarily based on a
desire for greater period authenticity, and that Chicken McNuggets,
or chili dogs, or any of the plethora of things that people want,
erroneously, to believe are period, and consequently back-document,
are period.

Sorry. Let me catch my breath a second here...

Hoping this clarifies things...

Adamantius