[Sca-cooks] Plantains: Period for Old World?

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 12:30:29 -0500
From: Judith Epstein <judith at ipstenu.org>

>In another thread, we discussed the notion that tomatoes were first 
>used (at least, in the Near East) as they would originally have used
>either eggplants or plums. This weekend, I tried four varieties of 
>plums in a dish that I usually make with one to four varieties of 
>tomatoes (depending on what's fresh and juicy at the market), and WOW,
>was that good.

Actually i also mentioned that they could well have replaced the use 
of tamarind.

>So. I know bananas are Old World... I was reading...
>that plantains are often [used] for a lot of the things that normally use 
>potatoes. I'm wondering if potatoes, when first brought back from the 
>New World, were used in ways that they would have normally used
>plantains.
SNIP
>1. The Old World had recipes, techniques, or treatments that used
>plantains as the starch.
>2. Potatoes were brought from the New World to the Old World.
>3. People weren't sure what to do with potatoes, so after a bit of 
>suspicious glaring, they started to use them in the dishes that had 
>originally used plantains.
>4. Plantain use waned while potato use waxed.
>5. Recipes evolved as time passed, sometimes very slowly and sometimes 
>rapidly.
>6. Now a dish that uses potatoes COULD conceivably be made with 
>plantains instead, and it MIGHT be Period. (Documentably? Probably 
>not, or someone would have surely crowed about it and done it by now,
>right? But it might be "reasonably Period" or "Peri-oid," right?)

NO! Not in Near or Middle Eastern recipes.

There ARE period recipes for bananas in the Arabic language corpus. 
They are sweets and appear to be made with "sweet" bananas, of which 
there are many varieties, even in the US where i live. I can get tiny 
red bananas, giant bananas called "pisang raja" in Indonesia, among 
others. And since Cavendish are suffering diseases these days due 
partly to the methods of commercial cultivation, other varieties are 
showing up. I lived in Indonesia for several years and got to eat 
many different kinds of bananas.

In the Arabic language recipe corpus, i don't remember seeing recipes 
for plantains, although with well over 1,000 recipes we have, i could 
have missed one. Still, based on my experience cooking period Near 
and Middle Eastern food (which you lack), it seems highly unlikely 
that potatoes replaced plantains in any of these recipes for specific 
historical reasons.

1. Most New World ingredients didn't enter the Ottoman Empire - which 
encompassed most of North Africa (including Algeria, Tunisia, and 
Egypt), the Levant (now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, 
Iraq, and Anatolia) - or Persia and Central Asia until the ** 18th ** 
century.

2. By then the cuisines had already changed a GREAT deal, due to 
wars, immigration of peoples from one culture into areas inhabited by 
another, alterations in regional trade, etc. All this BEFORE your 
precious potatoes and tomatoes showed up.

So potatoes, tomatoes, green (string) beans, and many many more did 
not enter 9th, or 10th, or 13th, or 15th, or 16th c. cuisines of the 
Near and Middle East.

They entered late 18th c. cuisines, which, to reiterate, had changed 
enormously from those of 200 years earlier. I have read recipes 
comparisons between those of SCA period and those bearing the same or 
related names from the 17th, 18th, and 18th c., and the changes are 
astonishing. Many of the dearly beloved Middle Eastern dishes 
familiar to us are no older than the mid-to late 19th c. at the 
earliest, so barely more than 100 years old.

If you want to know what potatoes and tomatoes replaced, you will 
need to study 18th c. Middle Eastern cuisine.

They replaced nothing in 16th c. or earlier Near and Middle Eastern cuisines.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita