[Sca-cooks] Adaptation and Redaction

David Friedman ddfr at daviddfriedman.com
Fri Jan 28 18:26:47 PST 2011


>While shopping at the local grocery store today I was thinking about 
>the choice of ingredients for our feasts and the terminology of 
>adaptation versus redaction, etc.
>What about about modern ingredients and their use?
>How many cooks create their feasts using only organic stone ground 
>flours, heirloom organic meats, and organic vegetables, fruits, 
>butters, imported cheeses, etc.?
>Can one justify that expense which can easily be triple or more? 
>Does that make the recipe an adaptation?
>
>Johnnae

I don't think so.

It would be an adaptation if you specified, say, corn starch as a 
substitute for wheat starch. But if you specify "flour," or white or 
whole wheat flour according to your best guess at what their flour 
would be like, you haven't adapted the recipe. You have given a 
description of how to make the recipe, one that would, you believe, 
work just fine with the original ingredients if they happened to be 
available. Even if what you made was in some sense an adaptation, the 
recipe wasn't.

Beyond that, I don't know that organic vegetables or imported cheese 
would necessarily make the result more authentic--one would have to 
know what is most like the original. It would be useful if you knew 
what kind of apples, say, they used, since fruit trees are reproduced 
by grafting, making the modern tree, in some cases, a clone of a tree 
that was growing in period. Similarly if you knew the variety of 
cabbage.

My impression is that "heirloom," "organic," and the like are usually 
an attempt to reproduce what was being done a century or two ago, 
which is still long past our period.
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com



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