[Sca-cooks] Discussion of usage of capsicum peppers in Asia in ourperiod.

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Huette von Ahrens:
>I have been having an argument with another
>Laurel (who is not a cooking laurel) about
>the use of capsicum peppers in Indian curries
>and in Chinese food in general.  She contends
>that since they were introduced within the SCA
>timeframe it would be fine to use them in an
>SCA banquet.  I said that they may have been
>introduced, but they weren't prevalent.

I've had this argument a million times. I tend to call it the Islamic 
Vikings With Guns Eating Chocolate argument: in essence, when a 
lifestyle phenomenon (such as eating chocolate, say) is determined to 
have occurred/existed in the SCA Period, it is suddenly typical of 
all of the SCA period, all over the world. This then means that, when 
you envision, for educational purposes, say, a 12th-century Norman 
clerical scholar living in the SCA period having at least theoretical 
access to all the materials  that are "period", that means that 
Abelard ate Hershey Bars (or Cadbury).

The fact that chiles were eaten in Asia before the end of period 
makes them, in some people's minds, perfectly fine as representative 
of Asian food in period.

>  When
>Phlip sent me Dr. Anderson's reply, I forwarded
>it on to her, but she said that it wasn't
>"definative" and even argued that he spelled a
>Chinese word incorrectly. The "la jiu" he
>mentions should have been "la jiao", amongst
>other things

You can point out to her that there are dialect differences, that 
spelling anything in modern pinyin is subject to those 
regional/dialectical pronunciations, that there is no such thing as a 
"Chinese word" (since there really is no language called "Chinese") 
except in written form, which in this case is pinyin, and that the la 
jiu versus la jiao distinction appears to be simply an attempt to 
discredit the source's qualifications, which are in fact  impeccable, 
even among the authorities who don't care for his pronunciation 
and/or written renderings of same.

>  and that the brown pepper he
>refered to was not citrus but closer to a
>renuncula.

I don't recall Dr. Anderson saying brown pepper was a citrus; I 
believe he said it was more like a citrus plant than like a pepper.


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