[Sca-cooks] Devilish Derivations

[kingstaste at mindspring.com]

Ok, I'm as guilty as anyone, having posted my Alton Brown response, but I
really don't want my late-night revelation to go un-noticed.  This idea
(below) seems like an original thought to me (those are harder to come by
every day, so I don't want one to slip by if I've actually had one).
If we can judge when a new food becomes part of a
country/region/nationalities' cuisine by when recipes start to appear for
it, that seems a fairly significant help to those looking to document
certain foods that are questionable.  Does this idea hold water, or is it
full of holes?
Christianna

-----Original Message-----
From: sca-cooks-bounces at ansteorra.org
[mailto:sca-cooks-bounces at ansteorra.org]On Behalf Of
kingstaste at mindspring.com
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2004 11:27 PM
To: Cooks within the SCA
Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] Devilish Derivations


Hm, I've just had a thought.  The earliest these 'Deviled' dishes show up is
mid-1700's as far as I can tell.  I'm wondering if that's the real way to
define when red peppers started showing up in general cuisine.  They didn't
use the term before that (unless someone shows up with a period reference
that has something with the term in it), so if it just starts showing up all
of a sudden, we have to look at why that might be happening, no?  If, as we
often state, the foods that were introduced from the New World took time to
be introduced, this might be the threshold of when they started to make it
into culinary usages.  It does make sense that they'd call stuff with
cayenne 'deviled', I would agree with that description ;)  And if it was new
to the tastes of diners, the term makes sense.
What say you?
Christianna