[Sca-cooks] Redaction?

[Jeff.Gedney at Dictaphone.com]

> "Redact" is a little more complicated than "edit."  It has the
connotation
> of accumulation and reduction.  For example, producing a written legal
code
> from a mish mash of verbal common law is a redaction (and one of the more
> common examples of the usage).

Tossing into the mix:
A frequent practice in our "recreation" of period recipes is that we look
for parallels in other similar period recipes to come up the the working
synopsis which we then adapt to modern cooking equipment zNd techniques.
 We often do this to "fill in the gaps" regarding ingredients or methods
used, as so often the menhods are poorly described.
This is clearly a reduction of information, several to one, and redaction
in this case thoroughly applies to what we are doing.

Where you do not take informative parallels from other period recipes or
modern survivals, there the basic process is adaptation.

As I know of few recipes in the corpus distributed on this list that are
NOT widely discussed and informative parallels taken from other recipes,
then the main bulk of what we do here IS redaction in the classic sense,
and few adaptations are tossed in.

"Redaction" is what we do, by and large.

Like it or not.  we take a LOT of information from several sources,
including modern practice and reduce it to "bring back" a recipe that was
cooked in period, but adapted for modern techniques/equipment.

That is "Redaction". plain and simple. in nearly every sense of the word.


Brandu

(and that will be my only post on this issue. )

"All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical
observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet
manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety -- and simply
breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300
syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx -- or
supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it-- and, by variously
pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the
manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff into a series
of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutterals, and other minor
atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of
sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words,
sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand
what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and
the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of
mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the
listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high
pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally
associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse.
Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed."
- Bill Bryson, "the Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way"