[Sca-cooks] Medieval questionaire

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Oct 27, 2007, at 2:20 PM, Diane & Micheal Reid wrote:

> I scored 83% eh oh well , didn`t know table cloths and beans, always
> thought there were beans in Period. Oh well
> Tea as we know maybe not but there were teas of different kinds I  
> suspect.
> Cealian

I got some of them "wrong", too, but it's basically a crap shoot on  
whether the reader will make the same specific suppositions (and often  
generalizations) the author has made. When data has to be qualified  
for time and place (IOW, almost all of the little quiz), it's easy to  
be simply unaware of what answer the author is looking for.

I believe he tosses the term "medieval" around without defining it by  
time and place, so, for example, tea or baked means may or may not be  
medieval, according to your guidelines.

I remember I was thrown by the whipped cream question, because all the  
recipes I've seen for "snow" are for a mixture of cream and egg white,  
and they're not simply beaten until a uniform, fine-textured foam/ 
cream (the foam is coarse and skimmed off the top of the liquid  
periodically as it is formed), so either he's got one of the recipes  
wrong, or one that may be atypical of the dish genre. Creme Chantilly,  
which is more or less what most people are thinking of when they say  
"whipped cream", at least the sweetened variety, is probably 17th  
century.

Another example of the deadly art of unnecessary equivocation.

Adamantius