[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)
>
>_______________________________________________
>Sca-cooks mailing list
>Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
>http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list