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

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach 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.

I find Assizes particularly useful, myself.

>   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'

Funny, I've never seen anything like that myself, and I've been on 
this list since it was about a day and a half old. I've seen 
secondary sources criticized for specific reasons that had not much 
to do with their being secondary sources, and I've seen the empirical 
statement that, all other things being equal, a primary source is 
better than a secondary source. But what amounts to a religious 
prejudice against secondary sources? No.

>  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.

True.

>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?

As far as I know, infinity. Where'd you get that from?

>  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?

You may have a point here; things vaguely like this guild reference 
have probably been said, but I think you're exaggerating, though. I 
think some people stated that we have few bread recipes, not none, 
and they may have speculated on reasons for their relative dearth. 
Not even close to the same thing; the condition is clearly a passive 
lack of information, much in the same way we don't have oodles of 
recipes for boiled greens. "Every housewife knows how to make them." 
In the case of bread, every housewife often _did_ make it, even when 
it was taken to the baker's to be baked. Or has this shift in focus 
suddenly revealed 200 new bread recipes? What we actually know (as 
opposes to what people have speculated on), has not really changed a 
lot.

>  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.)

Well, I'm glad you're here, but it's kind of a shame that it took one 
person's stupid statement (both in content and presentation) to 
accomplish it. Were you figuring you'd stem this massive tide of 
heresy?

>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?

Again, I don't recall that it was. I think people said they wished 
he'd included the original recipes. And when a book does indeed 
present a goldmine of information, it certainly helps people see it 
that way and appreciate it as it deserves to be, when it's easy to 
see that this was not written according to the Cosman method. 
(Briefly noting that "Fabulous Feasts" _also_ contains a wealth of 
truly useful information, and is unfairly marginalized as a source on 
the basis of some its more glaring defects...)

>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!

I agree, if I understand what you're saying. I just don't think that 
that's what "we" (Who's this "we", anyway?) are doing, at least not 
to the exclusion of other forms of research. It's hard to talk in 
"we's" without running a logically dangerous risk of generalizing. 
Yes, we probably do have people talking about medieval cooking in the 
SCA who wouldn't necessarily be qualified to write an even marginally 
informative children's book on the subject. We also have some people 
who used to behave that way, and now don't, and probably a whole new 
generation of people who will, and do, behave that way. I don't know 
that we're winning the fight against ignorance, but we do what we 
can, until a vaccine is produced. And yes, it's frustrating, but part 
of what you're referring to seems to be based on holding a group of 
more or less random individuals with different opinions and access to 
different information, responsible for some sort of vast conspiracy 
to promote misinformation. Group dynamics don't work that way.

Deep down, I think the biggest root of the problem I mentioned, and 
also the ones that Jadwiga mentioned, is the occasional tendency for 
people to let discussion on lists like this one take the place of 
actual research, and then spread what they hear, or what they think 
they hear, around as if everything they hear is both empirical fact 
and the result of research they themselves have done. And sometimes, 
understand fully. ;-)

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