[Sca-cooks] Dinner Impossible

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 31, 2008, at 12:43 AM, Ron Carnegie wrote:

> They showed period table diagram of the dishes, and told him that he  
> had to
> make 12 of the 15 dishes or something like that.  He had to use all  
> food
> that was produced there and had people advising him how to cook it.   
> If he
> used modern recipes, it wasn't obvious.  There may well have been  
> more info
> that they didn't bother to show on the air.

I didn't see it, but the recipes on the Food TV site are pretty well  
full of New World ingredients, more-or-less-post-period Old World  
ingredients that are unlikely to have appeared in European cookery in,  
say, the 16th century, and some distinctly post-Renaissance  
techniques, like sauces made from reductions mounted with butter  
(which is done in the 17th century all the time).

Oh, and one, open, unabashed, truly and literally anachronistic  
reference to late 19th / early 20th century French cookery, in a dish  
whose name puts a pretty specific time-stamp on it.

It certainly all looks pretty tasty, though...

I wonder if his approach was to produce a modern, haute-cuisine  
version of RennFaire food, rather than an attempt to do medieval or  
even renaissance European food, per se. It may have started on a  
simple premise like, "Those barbecued turkey legs have _got_ to go!"

Adamantius