[Sca-cooks] roast turkey

[Terry Decker]

>  I, personally, am of
> > the opinion that those foods which were relegated to 'curiosities', or
very difficult to find,
> > should be excluded from the mainstream SCA gastronomique.  Potatoes,
Corn, Turkey, Artichokes,
> > Chocolate, etc...
>
> I would say if you are doing a strictly documentable feast (I know
> there are recipes in
> period for the above items, but I don't have them) then yeah, don't
> cook with them.

Actually, it is more fun to find the primary sources and do a documentable
feast.

>
> If you were to do a feast featuring foods available in period, sure.
> It would be a fun
> feast to take these ingredients and use them in a period context. "A
> pottage of maize"
> "a fry of turkey"   or even "Arytichoke Pye".  To take them out of
> context and use them
> as if you had never seen them before would be a fun thing to do,
> refreshing even.

The point is a cook wouldn't take most of these foodstuffs out of context.
Columbus identified maize as a type of millet when he first saw it and
records of its subsequent use show that it was used like any other grain.
Turkeys are large birds, so cook them like large birds.  And artichokes were
an easier to use version of the cardoon.

> Yeah, a wild turkey is a worthy opponent, and they taste completely
> different than
> the schwarzzenturkies we get "all pumped up" from the store these days.
If
> I could do a feast where the only meat was wild turkey (or we could just
serve
> Wild Turkey...who would care about the feast then?) and make it feasible,
I
> would.
>
>
> Cadoc

The problem with this idea is the turkeys brought back to Spain weren't
wild.  They were pen raised, if not actually domesticated, Meleagris
gallopavo (probably rio grandensis, IIRC, and not the Agriocharis ocellata I
once thought them).  The fact that these were farmed in the New World very
likely led to the rapid spread of turkey farming in Europe.  They are the
ancestors of your "pumped up" turkeys.

Bear