[Sca-cooks] Food and personality

Suey lordhunt at gmail.com
Wed Mar 5 14:24:22 PST 2008


Cindy Renfrow:
> there's a reference to eating magpies in Athenaeus, Vol. II, p. 107.
> The passage is listing many birds served at a feast and says:
> 	"?ducks, ringdoves, geese, snipe, thrushes, larks, magpies, swans, 
> pelican, wagtails, crane?" >>
>
>
> Strange. My edition of Athenaeus (ed. Gulick)
>
> reads: "... ducks, pigeons, geese, sparrows, thrushes, larks, 
>
> jays, swans, pelican, wagtails, crane---".
>   
Translation mistake jays and magpies are in the same family. Super cousins.
>
> It is in volume II, page 107. My edition is "1928, repr. 1987".
>
>
> "jays" instead of "magpies". That's not the same kind of bird?
>
>
> E.
>
>
>   
I lead of life translating and personally
>
>
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 15:11:26 -0500
> From: "Barbara Benson" <voxeight at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Food and personality
> To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<b08895010803051211m18528f40o56a048259b24a091 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>   
>>>  Bear I think you are making a linguistic mistake equating
>>>       
> "fagioli" with favas
>   
>>  and chickpeas.  "Fagioli" derives from "phaseolus" and according to Pliny
>>  and others is different from favas and chickpeas.  There has been some
>>  dispute about precisely what "phaseolus" was, but a number of sources
>>  believe that it was a member of genus Vigna, essentially some variant of the
>>  black-eyed pea.  There is a 16th Century Italian painting titled "The Bean
>>  Eater" which shows an Italian peasant chowing down on what looks
>>  suspiciously like a bowl of black-eyed peas.
>>
>>  While the term "phaseolus" has become the genus name for the New World
>>  beans, "fagioli" modernly encompasses both genus Phaseolus and genus Vigna.
>>     
>
>
> Suspiciously, I would say exactly like a bowl of black eyed peas! This
> touches on something that has been twittering about in my brain for a
> while now.
>
> Several years ago I was doing research for a German feast and I ended
> up on a German Cookery list (in German heh) and they were incredibly
> helpful. One of the questions I asked was about what kind of bean to
> use in a specific recipe. One respondent said said that it was most
> likely referring to chickpeas. He then added the latin name (Vigna
> unguiculata) and described it as being readily identifiable by the
> black spot at it's center.
>
> Based on that I realized that he was talking about black eyed peas not
> what we colloquially refer to as Chickpeas. And this is what got me to
> thinking, and this is what has been swimming around in my brain. Are a
> goodly number of European individuals are that the English colloquial
> term for black eyed peas is Chickpeas? What do the British call black
> eyed peas? Here in the US we use Chickpea and Garbanzo beans
> interchangeably, but does the rest of the world? And if there is a
> considerable segment of non-native English speakers who say Chickpeas
> but are thinking black eyed peas - what about the culinary manuscripts
> that have been translated by Europeans into English? I know that many
> of the texts we use were translated not by Americans, but by other
> experts from Europe. If they learned English from someone that taught
> them that Chickpea = black eyed pea, then maybe our understanding of
> certain recipes is very wrong.
>
> So, I finally got that out of my brain and out here where y'all can
> pick it to pieces.
>
> What do y'all think?
>
>   




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