[Sca-cooks] Rotten meat and spices...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Chris Stanifer:
>And slopping hogs and milking goats gives you how much insight into 
>the daily life of a widow in
>Chaucerian times??  I think this goes back to the arguement that 
>there are very few, if any,
>people on this forum who can actually speak from a position of 
>knowledge on this matter, or any
>matter pertaining to the Middle Ages or Imperial 
>Rome....particularly when it comes to the food
>and daily life of the times.  There simply isn't enough surviving 
>material to base any kind of
>*expert* testimony on.  It's all conjecture, whether you have a 
>degree or a dormouse...

This sounds to me like a variant on "letting the best be the enemy of 
the good". It's true, we'll never know for sure about some of this 
stuff, but that's no reason not to be as prepared by familiarity with 
the available source material, and constantly on the lookout for new 
stuff, as possible.

Perfection, or the unattainability of same, is not the issue. The 
issue is that doing the best you can is generally better than not 
doing the best you can.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04