[Sca-cooks] Period or no?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach kattratt:
>Speaking of De Nola,
>BTW did anyone notice that The author himself pretty much gives 
>folks carte blanche permission to screw around with the recipes? 
>It is at the end of the book and he states something to the effect 
>of .... (No I am not going to look it up sorry...)
>These recipes are basics and if they need to be altered for any 
>reason then do so....
>Well if you read it right that is what he said...
>If this starts a huge argument then I will scan the actual passage 
>in my book and copy it to the list... But if you read close I think 
>that you will agree....
>Nichola

Eeeehhh, yes, all that is true. The trouble is, the alterations we 
may see as perfectly reasonable and/or necessary aren't necessarily 
the same alterations a period cook would see as reasonable or 
necessary. We don't know what they did when they were being creative; 
we only have the recipes, more or less. Sure, it seems harmless 
enough to chop raw meat and brown it in a pan, even though the period 
recipe calls for parboiling before chopping... our meat is probably 
more tender than theirs. On the other hand, our medieval counterparts 
might have been concerned with any of several concerns we generally 
don't have to deal with, ranging from the flavor of adrenalin-laced 
game to an excess of hot, dry humors, so what seems like a perfectly 
logical alteration of the instruction set to us may be anathema to 
them.

Now, before we introduce the straw man argument that invariably turns 
up in discussions on this, yes, it _is_ limiting, to some extent, to 
restrict ourselves to the ingredients and methods detailed in the 
recipes. Very true. On the other hand, when you're learning, say, to 
pilot a plane, you probably need to learn the great essentials of 
takeoff and landing before you learn that fun barrel roll or victory 
roll, and you probably want to learn from an actual, experienced 
pilot. This is essentially where our recipe corpus comes in.

That said, variations are fine, as long as we have a realistic view 
of what changes we made from the original process, and don't attempt 
to fool ourselves that what we've done is more than conjecture, at 
best. I do that a lot. I just get a little leery when I hear 
arguments like this one (or the great 'well, they _could_ have done 
it'), because they are sometimes [often] used as a sort of excuse for 
all kinds of weird stuff that doesn't get us any closer to 
understanding the craft of a medieval cook.

Adamantius

-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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Holt, 07/29/04