[Sca-cooks] New World Foods

[Lilinah]

Helewyse wrote:
>Nice class...

Thanks. Actually it was just one handout out of many for a class for 
beginning historical cooks, not the core of a class. Otherwise i'd 
have a much more expansive handout :-) That New World ingredients 
list was merely one out of eight handouts. We were trying to 
concentrate on cooking.  The New World food handout was intended to 
help the new cooks know whether or not to trust a modern redaction - 
if it was based on a pre-16th C recipe, none of those ingredients 
should be in it. And if it was from the 16th century, most of those 
would not be used. I had a few more items in the final version.

>...about my only major bug bear is that the spread of new world 
>foods across Europe was sporadic.  Like many things in our area of 
>research, sweeping generalizations can be tricky and misleading. 
>There is strong evidence that by the time Scappi wrote his book 
>(1570) there was already cultivation and culinary use of: New World 
>Squash, Maize, Turkey, and Modern beans (Phaseolus varieties).  My 
>paper on this is still available in the florilegium under New World 
>Foods in Old World Menus.  Your class though is a good overview of 
>the subject.

Actually i mentioned those in the revised handout.

I cook recipes from nearly all periods and places, including the 16th 
C., and we prepared a couple 16th C. recipes in the course of the 
class. So i've got nothing against the 16th C. :-)

In that handout, my implied points were:
1. the spread of these ingredients only took place in the 16th C., a 
small part of the period covered by the SCA.
2. they were adopted in only some parts of Europe, not everywhere universally.
3. while a few were used in Europe in the 16th C., none were used in 
the preceding 900 or more years covered by the SCA, that's 90 per 
cent of more of the time covered by the SCA.
...and my implicit goals were:
1. to inform new cooks about some ingredients in common use today 
that were unknown in Europe before 1492 at the earliest.
2. to guide new cooks away from very OOP modern recipes
3. to discourage the use of New World ingredients unless they 
actually appear in an historical recipe

Thanks for pointing out your paper, i hadn't seen. I'm repeating the 
class on my own at our A&S Tourney in June, and i can refer students 
to it.

Vittoria combined the handouts into two parts and put them in the 
Files section of our local cooks list, west-cooks on Yahoo groups.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/west-cooks/files

Doc Two contains what i intended as Part One, what we did in class:
-- Class Outline, pp. 1-3
-- The Recipes, pp. 4-6
(selected by Vittoria, and quite tasty)

Doc One contains what i intended as Part Two, supplementary materials:
-- Cookbooks for Beginning Historical Cooks, p. 1
-- SCA-period Cookbooks and Other Good Recipe Resources, pp. 2-12
-- Problematic Food History and Cookbooks, pp. 13-15
-- Of Course It's 'Course'!  Remove 'Remove'! by Elise Fleming (Dame 
Alys Katharine), pp. 16-17
-- The Myth of Disguising Rotten Meat with Spices (info from 
Johnnae), pp. 18-19
-- New World Ingredients, pp. 20-23
I forgot a few rather obvious ones :-( such as avocado, brazil nuts, 
maple syrup/sugar, quinoa, and which citrus fruits are "period" and 
which are not - which i've added to Version 1.1

I'll be teaching the class again at our A&S Tourney in June, without 
Vittoria, who's going to be rather busy with the Taverna - then i'll 
be running off to assist her.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
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