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

[Bill Fisher]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 07:06:55 -0500, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
<adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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).

I need to remember that one.  Even though I am a proponent of 
"theoretical" cooking, I never assume that anything we have evidence
of the introduction of was widespread.  

> 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.

Converse to this, are there any period recipes that use chiles?  I'm
honestly asking if anyone knows any.  I find this topic fascinating, and
it is one of the areas I know bupkus about so any knowledge is a lot
to me. (I've been fascinated with near-far east foods for a couple of 
years now, thanks to someone who made me eat sushi) 

> >  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

Brown pepper like a peppercorn (kinda like how the pink peppercorns
are not a pepper corn), or something that they subsumed the name 
of to name the chiles?

Cadoc
(wouldn't you like to be a pepper to?)
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