[Sca-cooks] "Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England"

[david friedman]

>But why would some of these leaps not work. Medical research today has shown
>that chicken soup when you have a cold is good for you and has healing
>abilities. I for one can say I eat chicken soup throughout the year even
>when I'm not sick. Just like many of us add things to our diets today that
>are considered medicinally good for us why could they not have done similar
>in early period.

Savelli isn't taking medicinal recipes and suggesting that people eat 
them. She is taking medicinal recipes and using them, very loosely, 
to guess what culinary recipes would be. For instance, she "deduces" 
the spicing of a sweet bread from a recipe for a salve and the 
ingedients for a meat stuffing from a recipe for a 
poultice--something that is applied externally.

>I'm researching 12/13th century Irish cooking and have to get references to
>food types and uses from references that are not cookbooks (they just don't
>seem to exist). It will help to understand why these interpretation from
>references such as the medical usage are considered not to be as accurate as
>others might be.
>
>Though I must say for camp cooking I like using these recipes just to give
>the feel of period cooking (and everyone will eat) over KFC and the like.
>Plus, as a diabetic these recipes fit in so well to the food limits.

The problem is that if you are using the recipes from "Tastes of 
Anglo-Saxon England" you are not giving people the feel of period 
cooking. You are giving her, for the most part, modern recipes copied 
or invented by the author with Anglo-Saxon names on them. The author 
uses ingredients not available in period without comment, and very 
nearly none of her recipes are from period sources. For details, see 
my review of the book:

http://dialup.pcisys.net/~mem/savelli.html
-- 
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/