[Sca-cooks] Period substitute for tomatoes?

[David Friedman]

>On Aug 23, 2009, at 11:30 PM, David Friedman wrote:
>
>>>Hummus should be nice and period and requires no cooking.
>>
>>Assuming you mean hummus bi tahini, I don't  know of any period 
>>recipes for it. There's an Islamic recipe in the expanded version 
>>of al-Baghdadi that has hummus and tahini in it, but if you try to 
>>make it it's pretty clear that it isn't the familiar dip. And 
>>there's a white salsa that I'm told tastes rather like hummus bi 
>>tahini, but I haven't actually tried it.
>>--
>>David/Cariadoc
>>www.daviddfriedman.com
>
>Right. The ingredients are Period, so the dish is Period-plausible, 
>but not documented. (Then again, how much documentation do we have 
>for other things that are way more complicated? Bread would've been 
>hard to come up with, originally, but it's as old as... well, beer, 
>actually. Hummous is chickpeas, sesame seeds, olive oil, and lemon 
>juice; all other ingredients are just variations on the theme. It's 
>hard to believe that no one put those things together before the end 
>of Period. They just probably didn't write it down, because why 
>write something down that's so simple? But... no, not *provably* 
>Period.)

Not sesame seeds but tahini, which is sesame seeds plus processing. 
But we know they had that too, because it shows up in some period 
recipes.

The problem with your argument is that they wrote down lots and lots 
and lots of simple things, as well as complicated things. Al-Warraq 
has multiple bread recipes, for instance. And many recipes for things 
no more complicated than hummus bi tahini, including dips.

The fact that the ingredients are period doesn't get you very far. 
The ingredients for blue jeans--cotton denim, blue dye, brass for 
buttons--are period too.

Imagine the dinner that would be cooked by a Chinese cook shopping in 
an American supermarket. Compare it to the dinner that would be 
cooked by an American cook shopping in a Chinese marketplace. The 
dinner with American ingredients would end up as a Chinese dinner, 
the dinner with Chinese ingredients as an American dinner.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com