[Sca-cooks] Re: rant on research (long)

[she not]

Gathering together several threads that have been percolating  at the back of my mind..

Mundane cooks,Newbie cooks,  scary period food, documentation anxiety..

Ive been playing on and off for over twenty years, and food is one of the things that always brings me back to the SCA-I started in the Outlands, playing with experienced cooks who did research for fun, which gave me a positive attitude to start.  I sympathize with the daunted , the frustrated and the confused; back when period recipes were hard to find, creativity, taste and period treatments were valued right up there with documentation, and oddly enough, we invented several recipes that are now documentable.  

 The best advice I could give any cook in the SCA: ignore the nonsense. I’ve heard it all..Nobody will eat period food, .Period food is nasty bad weird scary expensive hard, needs too much equipment (!?) and worst of all, not period if you can’t point to a specific recipe for exactly these ingredients combined in this manner.  All nonsense, mostly attributable to incompetent cooks and domineering ignoramuses.  

Yes, you’ll hear  scadians hate beans, pate, boiled meat fish and vegetables, need potatoes, and other wierdness. People who subsist on chips, salsa, fast food, hot dogs, who retch at the  mention of period food  and scream bloody murder at the dread word vegetarian - literally don’t know what they’re saying. When the food comes out, they gobble up all the tosted cheese, custard and apple tarts and scrounge other tables for one more bite of pie or roast without batting an eye. So.. Ignore them. 

 The truth is, if it looks good and smells good, they’ll taste it, and if it tastes good, they’ll eat  it all up. Make it so.  Cariadoc was quite right in saying-to paraphrase- the spirit counts for more than the documentation, because this re-creation is supposed to be fun, and vice versa. Trying to make food period is more of this FUN for everyone involved than churning out spaghetti. If,say, a stick jock whines about  period food, tell him you won’t agitate to cancel the tourney if he’ll shut up and let you have your fun too…then make the feast delicious. The problem will go away…because everyone knows if  you object to fun with recreation, an SCA event is the wrong place to be.  If you want to get in on the adventure of roasting a whole pig,  (and really, who doesn’t?) vote for period food. 

To become a period cook- the best way is get a big heap of books and start reading to get a feel for food of the period. (((I’m assuming that you are already a competent  cook, not a slave to recipes who blithely assumes instructions in a recipe can and will supercede the laws of physics; if you’re one of those, don’t try to cook for crowds till you’re cured of this delusion! Practice, experiment, and volunteer at every feast until you understand basic cooking principles)-

 Read some period literature and a good social history, find out what and how they ate.( try Giraldus Cambrensis  for Wales, the medici and Datti letters for Italy, student accounts for university towns, apprentice articles or travelers, courtiers and diplomat writings for various regions, etc. Sumptuary laws are always useful, and easy to find)  

Then move to period recipes and collections of traditional or peasant cookery of the area.  NOT trendy ethnic cookbooks, but ones with  holiday foods and stolid peasant food:, those don’t change much without a really major change in technology or local economy (This doesn’t work too well for Italy, for instance, because the tomato caused  a major change called  the ”red revolution” ) 

 Study these as if you were about to cook each recipe, to get a feel for methods: techniques, what use was made of ingredients -pretty quickly you’ll start to recognize the similarities, which will make better sense of period instructions.  (Attempts to modernize traditional techniques range from practical(use a crock pot instead of a cooling oven, thicken with tomato puree instead of bread soaked in vinegar) to hilarious-instructions to “sauté  a turkey” (!)sent my poor boggled mind fleeing  back to the more comprehensible “take off the spit part y-roste: ie roast it till it starts to brown )

 It helps to look up the names; you’ll find that ravioli things are called “pies”, just as in period books, which tells you that pies “seethed” are made with noodle paste rather than pie dough.

 ( A lot of talk about crusts: basics to remember : steam,boil or fry a flour water/egg dough,  bake or fry a short dough, bake or steam a hot water crust- these are marginally edible, primary purpose is structural strength to create a container for the meat, - because very often there simply weren’t enough pans. hence, coffyns. Pork pies, for instance, are generally modelled on a bread pan.)

By this time you should have a handle on what your persona has to work with.

Someone commented it’s a pity we don’t have medieval kitchens- but we do.  We can all have  a fire, a pot and a stick, which is your basic medieval kitchen:

 formal spits, extra pots, and (gasp) ovens were all luxuries, which you may have had access to but might not have at home.  Knowing this makes a lot of instructions, including grete pye and one pot meals clear: 

Picture yourself trying to produce a feast with fire, pot and spit. You’ll whip up a bunch of different fillings, separate them with dough, stack them up and carry it to the baker, then you’ll put whatever  meats and birds and hams and sausages don’t fit on your spit into your pot and simmer them, while the meat dripping on the spit browns, say, onions set on bread trenchers below.  Then you’ll make your dumplings, puddings and little pies and  drop them in the pot to cook, along with whatever veg you want. period recipes will tell you what seasonings, sauces and mixtures to use for all this.  When it’s time to eat, pull everything out of the pot, beat the soaked trenchers into the broth to thicken it, serve your period feast of soup and pies and meats and  veg.   This is as period as it gets.. This is what’s happening in the taverns, farmhouses,  small –medium households and army encampments you read about. You’ll find a version of this  in every traditional cuisine, called pot au
 feu, bolito, boiled dinner, scotch broth..It’s universal because it works.

 If you need more filler, get another pot, cook  pease,  barley or wheat  in the broth to make porridge or frumenty or trash the trenchers and put these in the big pot instead. Then you’ll have the drippings to make fried or rost treats for your feast. Remember;  you always have options- the period cookbooks say so. Right there, where it says “another way” All this can and would be done with one fire, which would be raked into the oven at the end, if you have an oven, to heat it for tommorows baking.  You can also put your pease or frumenty, tough meats and casserole things in  at this point to slow cook for tomorrow dinner.  

Cooks on the list will no doubt quibble furiously with some or all of this, but it’s the best way I know to demystify the art of period cooking. It wasn’t hard, or rigid, or complex.  . Anyone who  pretends there is “one true way” evidently hasn’t understood the  period material-( or the SCA)- at all.

gisele



"all men are intrinsical rascals, and I am only sorry that not being a dog I can't bite them."   Lord Byron
		
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