Rant on research; was, Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> Nor did all taverns and inns have ovens. We don't know a huge heck of 
> a lot about food service in such places, as far as I know. It's 
> conceivable that that the idea of mass-producing pies would have 
> brought gales of derisive laughter from the innkeeper. "Wot the 'ell 
> do ya think this is, bleedin' 'Ampton Court???"

GAHHHHHHH!!!! Ok, the Jadwiga 'plodes! I'm ranting, I hope you all will 
forgive me. 

For one thing, part of the reason that 'we' don't know much about this
stuff is because we haven't done nearly as much looking into situational
stuff as we have reading recipe manuscripts. There is information out
there about food service in cities. It's in legal records, regulations,
inventories, travel descriptions.  Most of the time we won't have the
time to comb these sources ourselves, so we'd need to rely on a scholar
to dig them up. Thus putting the information we need in that form
dreaded by all right-minded SCAdians, the Great Evil, the Eternal
Abombination, The SECONDARY SOURCE!

In the time I've been on the SCA-Cooks list, I've watched over and over 
again how people are ushered away from 'secondary sources' that talk 
about the historiography of cooking and kitchens and so forth, in terms 
of historical records analysis and archaelogy, in favor of 
recipe-reading. I don't dismiss recipe reading. If you want to cook 
period dishes, you need to read lots of recipes and try 'em out. But if 
you want to know about period foodways, you need to go further than the 
books of recipes.

I've had too many arguments on SCA Cooks that were informed ONLY by
recipes and modern homesteading, because people couldn't or wouldn't
read things like _Feeding a City: York_ and basic texts like Gies and
Gies... How long ago was it that there was a majority discussing meat
production on this list that didn't believe in the existence of period
butchers and butcher's shops? How long ago was it that people were
saying that we had no bread recipes because the baker's guilds kept them
a secret, not that people who bake about 6 different types of bread in
large quantities every day don't need to write the darn things down? I
got on this list because someone who was on it was telling people from
my group that 'everybody' knew that nobody ate raw fruit or veggies in
period. (It just so happens that that's just not true and we have
records to prove it.)

How long ago was it that Peter Brears' _All the King's Cooks_ was panned 
on this list for NOT HAVING ORIGINALS of the recipes, never mind the 
goldmine of information about how the tudor kitchens worked?

As long as we prefer reading recipes and navelgazing conversation with 
actually looking around at the sources available to us, we DO end up 
with people talking about medieval cooking in the SCA who don't know 
even as much about it as Aliki did when he/she wrote a kid's book in 
1985!

Ok. Deep breath. I'm better now.

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"Information wants to be a Socialist... not a Communist or a 
Republican." - Karen Schneider