[Sca-cooks] Valentine's Day dinner... sort of...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

...was fairly to moderately dreadful. We had committed to attending 
the 70th birthday party of a newish friend of some old friends, at 
whose home this party was to be held. The Birthday Girl was in charge 
of dinner, and it was... unique. Some of it was quite good, although 
a lot of it I simply chose to avoid, since it involved nutrients I am 
avoiding at present. There was a seafood curry, and I can only say I 
haven't had a curry like that since I was a child, but even though 
when people normally say that it is meant as a good thing, in this 
case, it wasn't, or at least not as god as I hoped it would be.  It 
reminded me of some English or Imperial curry recipes, basically 
English interpretations or imitations of real Indian curries. This 
seemed to be some kind of cream or white sauce with a little curry 
powder in it , with chopped apples and onions, with, of course, all 
sorts of stuff in little dishes to sprinkle on top. My mother used to 
make a chicken curry along those lines (although hers was 
tomato-based), but as kids the fun part was dousing it all with 
raisins, coconut, peanuts, pineapple, etc.

I don't normally see that much at Indian restaurants ;-).

I think the main reason I was a little uncomfortable, though, was 
that there were just too many people, and nobody could really carry 
on much of a conversation for any period of time, there was a  lot of 
milling around. My ever-tactful spouse said it reminded her of some 
SCA events she remembered ;-). As I type, I'm sitting with some 
thinly-sliced sopressata and mozzarella with herbs, olives and a few 
toasted macadamia nuts.

Well, there was one interesting incident that kind of stood out. I 
was sitting and talking to someone or other, and my lady wife was 
talking to someone else, and I heard, with that cook's radar, the 
words "medieval recipes" emerge from my wife's mouth. I turned and 
looked, to discover that my wife, and the lady to whom she was 
talking, were saying something about my interest in medieval recipes. 
Not knowing what else to say, I nodded, looking authoritative, and 
said, "Yes, medieval recipes!"

The other lady was a woman named Lee, apparently, and she said to me, 
"Well, if you're interested in medieval recipes, you're probably 
familiar with the work of my cousin, who wrote a rather well-known 
book on the subject."

"Please, God," I'm praying silently, "let it be Karen Hess." Chilling 
premonition going up and down my spine, I said, "Are you by any 
chance the cousin of Madeline Pellner Cosman? 'Fabulous Feasts'?"

"Yes," she said, "that's right! Have you seen her book? Yes? What did 
you think of it?"

"I thought it was terr... well, let me put it another way. At the 
time the book was written, there were very few alternatives for those 
interested in adapted, secondary sources. Maybe two or three others 
were commonly available, and she wasn't writing for an audience of 
historical re-creators or Living History types anyway, but the 
unfortunate reality is that while she deserves respect as a 
trailblazer, there are now a _LOT_ more books on this subject than 
there used to be, and for anyone seriously interested in eating 
medieval food as it was in the Middle Ages, in the way it was eaten 
in the Middle Ages, there are a lot of options available, and very 
nearly every last one of them is better than "Fabulous Feasts". I can 
think of one book I would recommend _after_ "Fabulous Feasts". But, 
as I say, when it was written there weren't a lot of options 
available for those who didn't want to go to the manuscripts 
themselves, so that's something, anyway."

"Dear, it's so sweet of you to defend her that way, but you needn't 
on my account. Nobody in the family likes her anyway... she _made_ 
her own mother buy copies of her book..."

So we spent a lovely half-hour swapping Madeline Pellner Cosman 
stories, ending with my falsetto impersonation of her speaking of 
medieval people eating with their hands... "The food is conveyed to 
the mouth not with forks, but with those multipurpose extensions to 
the carpal bones of the hand; I refer of course to thah 
_fin-gaaaaaahs_." I said she sounded like a cross between Margaret 
Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie and Natalie Schaeffer as Mrs. 
Thurston Howell.

"Yes," says the cousin, "we all love her accent, too. How she got it 
in a Jewish home in Brooklyn is one of life's great mysteries."

Adamantius