[Sca-cooks] Odd Question
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
Tue May 13 15:11:32 PDT 2014
Not in this case I don't.
My point is very simple: whatever one thinks of the research here, or the
English term chosen for a dish which really had no equivalent in the Western
world, the translator was NOT just "making stuff up". The fact that his
research turned out to be less accurate than that of future researchers is
not unexpected. But he made a serious effort with what resources he had at
hand to understand what these dishes were and to communicate that to his
readers. If anything, he went further with such efforts than some modern food
writers, who are often content, for instance, to pass on ideas from Le Grand
d'Aussy or other previous writers without doing fresh research to be sure
these are right (often, they aren't).
There's a huge difference between working within the limitations of the
knowledge of one's own time and "making stuff up." I haven't claimed he got
everything right - though his description of herissa seems fair enough:
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2012/01/harissa-history.html
But it's simply not fair to say someone who didn't have access to later
research was simply fabricating facts (as in fact some food writers seem to
do, even today) when, to the contrary, it's quite clear that he was trying to
research and understand the terms he was using.
Jim Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/)
Beyond Apicius (2): recipes from other Roman sources
_http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2014/05/beyond-apicius-2-recipes-from-other.ht
ml_
(http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2014/04/beyond-wine-water-and-beer-what-else.html)
In a message dated 5/13/2014 2:52:32 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
lilinah at earthlink.net writes:
Burton knew that Sikbaj was "Queen of Dishes" but he didn't really know
what was in it or how it was served. I'm sure he did his best, because he was
personally invested in the culture. But even he hadn't read Ibn Sayyar
al-Warraq's cookbook to know what REALLY was cooked in 9th c. Baghdad.
You really need to attend to Charles Perry...
Urtatim
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