[Sca-cooks] Turkeys ARE Period!
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Dec 16 11:01:55 PST 2006
On Dec 16, 2006, at 12:35 PM, David Friedman wrote:
>> There was quite a bit of confusion as to where things came from.
>> Fuchs
>> (1541) refers to chili peppers as Indische and Calcuttisha Pfeffer
>> and maize
>> as Turkishe Korn (if I got the spellings correct). That beats out
>> Gerard by
>> half a century.
>
> If I remember correctly, Finan, John J., Maize in the Great Herbals,
> suggests that maize was referred to as "Indian corn" not out of a
> confusion between the New World and Asia but because Pliny described
> something that sounded similar called "Indian corn" and maize was by
> some misidentified with that.
I think part of the problem may be with license taken in illustrating
certain grains on the ear, either when an artist is working from a
description of an item he has not actually seen, or in taking
shortcuts for convenience (for example, the illuminations of mail
armor that looks like chicken wire). It occurs to me that there might
have been illuminators or printers that could look at, or have
described to them, an ear of sorghum, which has a largish, oblong
ear, and a multitude of grains speckled on it more or less randomly,
like giant, mutant millet, and portray it with a series of straight
lines in a grid pattern (as we tend to get with maize). If you've
never seen either, it's not a problem. It's a foreign grain from the
Mysterious Orient, a.k.a. Turkish Grain. If you're familiar with
Asian or African sorghum, it's not that much of a stretch; you shrug
and move on. It's only when you're only familiar (or mostly familiar)
with maize that it's really easy to assume that that is a depiction
of an ear of maize.
In short, it could be a coincidence that the illustrated ears of
Turkey Corn could look more like maize than what they might actually
be intended to depict.
If ya folla...
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
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