[Sca-cooks] Food Authenticity

[Johnna Holloway]

An article in this past weekend's Financial Times was on Food Authenticity.
"Time to eat" By Tim Hayward
Is it possible to recreate accurately historical dishes? Perhaps, but when it comes to food, beware all claims to authenticity 
It mentioned both Ivan Day and the Kitchen Boys at HCP.

"At a time when we in Britain are trying to reconnect with our own food history (as Polly Russell’s History Cook column in this magazine bears witness), authenticity is a live issue. With the only primary historical evidence available being recipes, a sort of academic subculture has grown up of people cooking in historical style. Food historian Ivan Day, the Food Archaeologists team at Hampton Court Palace, Dr Annie Gray’s “live interpreters” – fully costumed Victorian chefs – at places such as Audley End stately home, all have serious academic underpinnings, using a kind of creative “re-living” process as part of their research. They begin with what historical evidence they can find but in recreating the dish, they understand its limitations and its flavours in a way that no  recipe, no system of notation could ever hope to achieve. It may seem odd that the best way to understand, say, Georgian cookery is to dress up and cook it but this kind of research is as useful as it is possible to be in understanding past or distant food cultures."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/104bccbe-a6f7-11e2-885b-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2RExtFaDU

Johnnae




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