[Sca-cooks] - a slight rant on logic (was Sauerbraten)

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jeff Gedney:
>to quote from a Monty Python Album:
>"'All wood burns', states Sir Bedevere, 'therefore all that burns is 
>wood'... this is of course pure bulls**t! Universal affirmatives can 
>only be _partially_ converted... for example, all of Alma Cogan is 
>dead, but only SOME of the class of Dead People are Alma Cogan. 
>'Obvious!' One would think..."
>
>All of the Sauerbraten recipes are boiled spiced beef, but only SOME 
>of the boils spiced beef recipes can be considered Sauerbraten...
>and I haven't seen any of those from a period text...
>
>...YET
>
>
>Capt Elias
>-Renaissance Geek of the Cyber Seas

Tsk, tsk. Those wacky evolutionists ;-).

But I have to agree. Research that takes its shape based on the 
conclusion you want to draw, instead of taking you in a certain 
direction because it's good research and damn the torpedoes, as it 
were, is a bad thing.

We've found a recipe that involve marinated, seared, boiled and 
spiced beef, and one involving lebkuchen as flavoring and, perhaps, 
thickening of a sweet sauce for meat. However, we have, so far, no 
evidence that these elements were combined in a single process or 
recipe, nor have we addressed the likelihood that the reason for the 
vinegar in sauerbraten is either as a preservative, or as a 
tenderizer, or both, since the recipes we've found call for wine. And 
apart from sekt, which is a 19th-century-ism, AFAIK, German wines 
tend not to be acidic.

Off the top of our collective heads, do we have period recipes for a 
vinegar-jugged hare (a.k.a. hassenpfeffer) in those same German 
sources? If we did , we might actually be coming closer to the whole 
"pickle, then cook" mentality.

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