[Sca-cooks] Encouraging Period Cooking

[Ian Kusz]

One thing I liked learning, that I think we should also make sure is
disseminated, is that not all medieval food is of the "simmer for 4 hours,
stirring constantly) variety.

It's not that work-intensive.

One of the reasons that I think many people think it is, is because we tout
so many "labor-saving" devices as being modern, implying that anything old
is a lotta work.

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 3:05 PM, David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>wrote:

>   > I know in some Kingdoms you have things like all day
>>
>>>  feasts, and that it can be the center of an event.?
>>>  Here we have so much antagonism and blase attitudes
>>>  toward "period" foods, that if someone tried to do,
>>>  "unusual", the event and the feast would fail.?
>>>
>>>  Mirianna
>>>
>>
>> Changing the cultural attitudes of a kingdom is often a lengthy process.
>> This includes the negative attitudes toward period food.
>>
>> Make very tasty food and be generous with it. Only after the tasters have
>> eaten it and been pleased do you tell them that it is period. i.e. fool them
>> into liking period food :-)
>>
>
> Note that this can be done on an individual scale. We routinely bring
> period nibbles to events and offer them to anyone who wants to try them.
>
> Something else we have done that seems to help is to hold cooking workshops
> in our house. Everyone is welcome, people are asked to tell us a day or two
> in advance if they are coming. We select period recipes and make sure we
> have the ingredients. When you arrive, typically about one on a Saturday
> afternoon, we hand you  a stack of recipes. You pick one. Everyone spends
> the afternoon cooking one recipe, tasting everyone's recipes, making
> comments for the next try of the recipe. It's a low key friendly kind of
> activity, and ends up with more people knowing both that period food can be
> fun and then cooking from a period recipe isn't all that hard.
> --
> David/Cariadoc
> www.daviddfriedman.com
>
> --
> Ian of Oertha
>