[Sca-cooks] Plantains: Period for Old World?
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 1 13:33:08 PDT 2009
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
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