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

[Patricia Collum]

When I saw this late last night I had a differrent take on it entirely. I
was thinking of some poor period cook being given a theme for there feast of
"food of the future" with this list of , well, these are the ingredients
that they will have available to them, and here is some notes on their
presentation, now we all know with your cooking expertise you can duplicate
what they will eat" instead of the way we doit now for the past. The lesson
for the consumer in is how completely different from the actual modern
sandwich each person would come up with. Very tasty food, but not the
original, not even close.

Cecily
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 3:59 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] An Evil Thought- Excercise in Intelligence


> 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
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