[Sca-cooks] Foods for Begining SCA Cooks

[David Friedman]

>In addition, as an SCA cook, unless I'm cooking for an arts competition
>where the requirement is that I be reproducing a redacted recipe as
>accurately as possible, I'm old school about believing that *Creatively*
>anachronistic recipes are acceptable.

"Acceptable" meaning there is nothing wrong with your cooking and 
eating them at events, or "acceptable" meaning that there is nothing 
wrong with telling people they are medieval? Those are very different 
things.

>My reasoning is this.  Period cooks
>didn't write everything down.  Good cooks, modern or from any period,
>generally don't slavishly follow recipes anyway... they start with what they
>know and then adapt to the tastes of their diners.  I do the same thing with
>my SCA cooking.  I try to learn as much as I can about period ingredients,
>cooking techniques and common foods as possible, and to stay as close to my
>understanding of period cooking styles and ingredients as possible, but I
>rarely work from a redacted recipe feeling that I can't experiment from
>there.  At most I might begin with a redacted recipe and then modify to my
>tastes and the tastes of my diners (with there being rare exceptions when I
>find something that I don't think should be messed with, like shortbread ;-)

The problem with this approach is that you and I, unlike a medieval 
cook, didn't grow up cooking and eating medieval food--so when we 
decide to invent a recipe, or modify a recipe to  taste, we are doing 
it from the standpoint of a modern person with modern tastes and 
experiences. The closest we can come to solving that problem is to 
actually cook from period recipes, staying as close to the originals 
as we can. Unless one has done a great deal of that, how can one 
adapt a recipe with any confidence that it is an adaptation a 
medieval cook would have made? Eating lots of SCA feasts doesn't do 
it because many, probably most, dishes in SCA feasts aren't from 
period recipes, although that situation has improved somewhat over 
the years.

Or in other words, I agree that the dishes a medieval cook would have 
made would include some we have recipes for and some we don't. But we 
don't know what the ones we don't have recipes for are. We don't, for 
example, know that a medieval cook would have made sweet pasties by 
taking a recipe for rabbits in sauce, substituting beef and chicken, 
and then putting it in pastry shells.

Incidentally, if by "a redacted recipe" you mean a recipe someone 
else has worked out from a period source, I agree that working from 
such is somewhat limiting. It's much more interesting to work from 
the original. It also provides a better opportunity to learn what 
medieval cooking was like, since the recipe hasn't been filtered 
through a modern redactor. A redacted recipe that doesn't include the 
original is particularly risky, since you have know way of knowing 
how much of it is medieval and how much invented by the modern 
"redactor."

Is your "like shortbread" a reference to a modern recipe? There's a 
long discussion in the Florilegium of the question of whether 
shortbread is period. The answer seems to be that there are late 
period recipes which might or might not produce something similar, 
but nobody came up with anything really close to a standard modern 
shortbread. Part of the reason one can't tell is that the recipes 
that look closest don't tell you how much sugar to use, so it's hard 
to say whether it is as major an ingredient. The recipes also 
recommend cream over butter, although butter is an option, which 
doesn't sound quite like a modern shortbread.

...

>*That* said,
>
>a) I have to apologize for a misstatement in my previous post.  The recipe I
>used for the filling in the pasties was a recipe for "rabbits in sauce", not
>"rabbit stew" as I originally stated.  Since the cookbook it was in is now
>apparently out of print and I no longer have a copy,

I think it likely that it was _How to Cook Forsoothly_ by Katrine de 
Baille du Chat. At least, it's an old SCA cookbook and has a recipe 
entitled "Rabbit in Sauce".

The recipe starts out by saying that it is "a modern dish composed in 
the style of the middle ages." She goes on to explain the use of 
Worcestershire sauce in that recipe and some earlier ones as a 
substitute for liquimen--because the original recipes she is inspired 
by are from Apicius.

Or in other words, assuming I've got the source right, your invented 
medieval recipe is loosely based on someone else's invented medieval 
recipe, itself inspired by recipes in a Roman cookbook.

>So, I'm sorry that it was confusing that I didn't provide stringent
>documentation, but my intent was not to represent my original creations as
>"authentic", and I expected that the ideas would be sufficient starting
>points for the original poster to begin with to find recipes which suited
>her desired level of authenticity.

The original poster wrote that:

"I thought that I might bring some samples of Medieval and Rennaissance food
for the class."

So I thought it reasonable to assume that someone posting suggestions 
in reply intended to offer samples of Medieval and Renaissance food. 
I'm not arguing that one should always provide "stringent 
documentation" or that one should never do anything that isn't 
period--merely that we should make an effort not to confuse what is 
done in the SCA with what we have good reason to believe was done in 
period.

...

>So I do sincerely regret having offended you, my Lord,

You didn't offend me. You gave me an opportunity to try to persuade 
you that it is worth clearly distinguishing medieval food from food 
that people make in the SCA because they think it seems sort of 
medieval. I probably failed--but you also gave me an opportunity to 
try to persuade other people.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com