[Sca-cooks] Drizzle of Honey

David Friedman ddfr at daviddfriedman.com
Thu Oct 29 10:10:33 PDT 2009


>But when cooking in my own camp, I WILL use period-plausible 
>ingredients (unless we don't know what they were, or they're not 
>available, and then I'll use my best judgement), but I will not be 
>using a recipe. In my own camp, I interpret my role as that of an 
>independent mistress of her domain, her own home and kitchen, and 
>the cooking gets done MY way.

Aside from avoiding ingredients you don't think they had, how is this 
different from your modern cooking? If it isn't, aren't you missing 
an opportunity to do something interesting and educational?

The independent mistress in her own domain in the 14th century had 
grown up eating 14th century food and watching other people cook it, 
so if she improvised she was improvising in that cuisine. If you want 
to be able to do the same, I don't think there's any practical way 
other than actually going to the period cookbooks and cooking lots of 
their recipes. After you have done that, you might be able to invent 
your own recipes that were reasonably close to what she would have 
done.

You are never going to get to that point if you regard cooking from 
period recipes as something you would do if you were putting on a 
feast or entering a contest, rather than something you do for your 
SCA cooking for yourself for the fun (and education) of it.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com


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