[Sca-cooks] "Fabulous Feasts"

Carol Smith eskesmith at hotmail.com
Sun Apr 8 10:02:16 PDT 2007


I  joined the SCA around AS 6 or 7, through cooking.  (Anyone here like to 
cook?  Can you follow a recipe?  "Yeah, sure."  And then I met "cabojes"...)
As one who was around "back then", I can say that "Fab Feasts" wasn't used 
that much, at least in my area of the Eastern Kingdom, though it was often 
cited as a "bad source".  (I looked at it, read some of its recipes, and 
decided not to get it on that basis.  I have since heard that the first half 
of it isn't that bad, but back then, I wasn's going to get a Medieval 
cookbook I couldn't use in the kitchen.)
Back then, our primary sources were the "Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks" 
and "Curye on Inglish", with a translation of Platina added a little later.  
(It was the Mallinkrodt edition from their line of historical food 
documents; there was on on gelatin, and a couple of them on other odd 
things, as I recall.  And we have better translations of Platina now, too; I 
own at least one other copy.)  Cariadoc, of course, had many other sources, 
many of which were Middle Eastern in origin, even back then.  I problably 
stil have one of the earliest editions of his cookbook reprints, which also 
introduced me to a middle eastern source and to a translation fo Goodman of 
Paris.

Regards,
Brekke


>From: "Nick Sasso" <grizly at mindspring.com>
>Reply-To: grizly at mindspring.com,Cooks within the SCA 
><sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
>To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
>Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] "Fabulous Feasts"
>Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 10:30:19 -0400
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>Lord Vitaliano commented:
><<< Well, this is all great stuff, I now know what NOT to read, of
>course,
>Fab Feasts was never on my reading lists, and this Frugal Gourmet stuff
>never really interested me either. >>>
>
>Actually the first half of "Fabulous Feasts", the section which talks
>about the history of various medieval foods and cooking isn't that
>bad. The problem is with the recipes in the second half, since many
>aren't that good, and no original recipes or attributions are given.
>So, it isn't a bad read, just don't use the second half of the book
>as good examples of medieval recipes.  > > > > > > >
>
>
>BOTH books have value in and of themselves, from my side of the proverbial
>tracks.  Fab Feasts is the early incarnation of the desire for more
>historically anchored meals in the SCA hobby.  The research and recipe
>construction lacks the sophistication of the current corpus, some 30 years
>later, but needs a tip of the hat as being part of the development of what
>we do today.
>
>Frugal Gourmet has many really good recipes in his body of work.  His
>editorial and production staff did a little background research to give 
>some
>color to his ethnic and domestic recipes sets, and I don't think they ever
>claimed to be a research resource.  They were entertaining and I daresay a
>significant part of the "normalization" and popularization of cookery and
>food on television.  All of the unsavory ajudicated behaviors aside, his
>cookbook collection is a very decent source for beginning to intermediate
>home cooks to enter some unusual cusines they might not otherwise try.
>
>
>niccolo difrancesco
>(learned: hot wok . . . cold oil . . . food won't stick)
>
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