[Sca-cooks] Question for Adamantius?

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Adamantius wrote:
>We've got at least one Laurel here who actively promotes the premise 
>that, according to her correspondence with real-live, actual 
>Persians, Persian cooking has not changed significantly in 500 years.
>
>Well, there you go. Their use of things like capsicums and tomatoes 
>must have evolved independently from the European voyages of 
>exploration beginning in the late 15th century...

I've got photocopies of the two surviving Safavid Persian cookbooks, 
one from the early 16th c. and the other barely early 17th. I just 
can't read Persian, or i'd be working on them.

I've read references to these books in scholarly articles, which 
provide general discussions of the cookbooks and recipes. Apparently 
one of the books is almost entirely pilaf/pilao recipes, that is, 
rice cooked with meat and other ingredients, which are typical of the 
wealthy only, while the other presents remarkably detailed recipes 
from a royal kitchen. Clearly the modern scholars read the books but 
never considered it worthwhile to translate them into any Western 
European language and publish them :(

What i want to know is how that SCAdian knows what SCA-period Persian 
cuisine was like, since few real-live, actual Persians were alive in 
SCA period to report back. And as far as i can tell from my contacts, 
few real-live, actual Persians have read historical Persian 
cookbooks. Basically she's supporting the old canard that traditional 
equals historical. Sigh.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita