[Sca-cooks] Drizzle of Honey

[Antonia Calvo]

Susan Fox wrote:

> Occasionally the heart can be wrong.  I finally won an argument with a 
> friend who insisted that Mayonnaise was OK for SCA use because all the 
> ingredients were known in pre-1600 Europe.  That may be so, but there 
> was no written evidence of that kind of emulsified sauce being 
> invented much before the 18th Century and that story about the chef of 
> the Duc de Richelieu having invented it in 1756.


Although, interestingly enough, there are a couple of recipes from the 
Elizibethan corpus that come out not unlike Hollandaise...

> But she just would not let go.  So, she being a costume maven, I took 
> it into the costuming world and insisted that since cotton fabric, 
> indigo dye and copper rivets were known in pre-1600 Europe, that it 
> was OK for me to wear blue jeans.  Even though we have a solid date as 
> to their invention by Levi Strauss in California.  She shut up.


That's the reverse of my 15th-century French sushi diatribe :-)

> Certainly we have a lot of non-cookbook writings about the lives of 
> Jews and Conversos in late Medieval Spain.  We need to run those down 
> for solid dating of certain practices and put them all in one place.  
> Even an article with annotations for the existing book would be 
> helpful for SCA purposes... but maybe a new book would be valuable, 
> not just for SCA researchers but anybody interested in Jewish cultural 
> heritage in general. 



It's been a while since I read that book, but, IIRC, while the recipes 
were basically fabrications, it *did* contain plenty of general 
information about Spanish-Jewish meals, food preferences, etc.


-- 
Antonia di Benedetto Calvo

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Habeo metrum - musicamque,
hominem meam. Expectat alium quid?
-Georgeus Gershwinus
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