[Sca-cooks] Feast

[Terry Decker]

And did the people who provided the recipe give you a citation of sources, 
or did they just assure you it was period?  Acceptance of bad scholarship 
promotes error.

The recipe in question is probably derived from Aresty's The Delectable Past 
wherein is a recipe for Rosti said to be taken from "an early German 
cookbook" (the cookbook of Anna Weckerin, which is about 1598, IIRC).  I'm 
cautious when dealing with Aresty as she does not include precise sources or 
original recipes in her work.  I've been looking for a number of years and 
I've yet to find the source, a transcription or a translation of the Rosti 
recipe.

As for potatoes in Europe, the earliest reference is from Spain in the 
1570's.  Gerard received his samples in 1586.  And Carollus Clusius, who is 
probably responsible for the spread of potatoes to botanists across Northern 
Europe, received his first sample in 1587.  In 1601, Clusius noted, " It is 
a great wonder to me that, when it was so comman and frequent in the Italian 
settlements (so they say), that they feast upon these tubers, cooked with 
the flesh of mutton, in the same manner as upon turnips and carrots, they 
give themselves the advantage of such nourishment, and allow news of the 
plant to reach us in such an off-hand way."

In 1591, Wilhelm IV von Hessen wrote to Christian I von Sachsen and included 
a recipe for taratouphili in the letter.  "We also send to your Highness 
among other things a plant that we got from Italy some years ago, called 
Taratouphli (.) Below, at the root, there hand many tubers. If they are 
cooked these tubers are very good to eat. But you must first boil them in 
water, so that the outer shell (peeling?) gets off, then pour the cooking 
water away, and cook them to the point in butter."

So, pot roast or stew and boiled potatoes, but no Rosti.

Personally, for a feast, I would choose sweet potatoes over white potatoes. 
There are a number of actual recipes and historical evidence that they were 
well known and in much wider use than white potatoes.

Bear

>I am a bit cinfused I recieved the recipe at an SCA feast and it is not the
>first time I have seen included in feast.  Historically speaking there were
>potatoes in Europe in the 1500's.  I do like the idea of the Losyns with
>the chicken.
>
> thanks
>
> Jaime