[Sca-cooks] Period or no?

[Elaine Koogler]

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

> 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
>
In fact, truth be told, I suspect most of us follow recipes exactly even 
in modern cooking.  I know that when I first try a recipe, especially if 
it's something where I want to see what the person who created the 
recipe had in mind, I follow the recipe pretty much as written.  
Recently I made a wonderful (reaching around, patting myself on the 
back!) beef stew from a recipe I found in the latest Williams Sonoma 
catalogue.  Now I've been making my own version of beef stew for 
years...I just wanted to see how this one tasted.  I did make a couple 
of changes to make it low carb/low fat...I used turnips instead of 
potatoes and soy flour instead of white flour...and know that I have 
already altered the taste.  But I even measured the 
seasonings...something I almost never do with soups/stews/etc.  It was 
wonderful and I'll probably continue to make it this way...though, come 
to think about it, juniper berries might add a little depth to the 
seasoning, she muses!

So it's perfectly reasonable to follow a recipe exactly the first time, 
then, knowing that we're altering it, make some "additions" or 
"subtractions" as we get more familiar with it.

Kiri