[Sca-cooks] Turkeys ARE Period!

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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