[Sca-cooks] Substitute for Potatoes?

[Judith Epstein]

On Aug 24, 2009, at 1:49 PM, David Friedman wrote:

>> On Aug 23, 2009, at 11:13 PM, Solveig Throndardottir wrote:
>>
>>> Noble Cousin!
>>>
>>> Greetings from Solveig! Potatoes are from Peru. However, there are  
>>> a number of old world tubers available such as yams Dioscorea  
>>> species which originated in West Africa and Asia.
>>>
>>> Yes, and I fully intend to use yams in my Period cooking.
>
> Off hand, I can't think of any recipes in either the period European  
> or Islamic corpus that use them.

The part I think is amazing is that people need BOOKS just to COOK. If  
I were putting on a documented Period feast, I would worry about that,  
because I'd be assuming I was in charge of feeding royals and nobles  
-- people who could afford to give books to their servants (cooks).  
But for the general populace, good grief. I never owned or used a  
single cookbook till I was about thirty and someone gave me one,  
thinking it was such a shocking thing that I didn't own any cook  
books. I assure you, though, I did cook, I never went hungry, and to  
this day it doesn't occur to me to consult anything in writing if I'm  
cooking for my family. I really find it hard to believe that I'm THAT  
different from our ancestors.