[Sca-cooks] Pretzels

[Solveig Throndardottir]

Noble Cousins!

Greetings from Solveig! I was very much hoping to make it to Ice Dragon to get this done, but I hope that people I contact electronically will be able to help me out instead. As you may or may not know I have been ostensibly working on an annotated translation of a cookbook in a culture where we do not have a lot generally available at the moment. OK - I have the recipes pretty much translated, so what else should go in the actual monograph? Please make suggestions about what you would like to see, what would be most important to you, why you want to see what you are asking for, &c. Here are some suggestions of things you might suggest. And, please feel free to adopt any of these as your own suggestions. I am not sure whether to do these are not. Incidentally, the original cookbook devotes it's first seven of twenty sections to lists of ingredients and what each ingredient can be used for. I am in the middle of writing the list below. Yes, I guess that I am asking you to do a bunch of thinking and possibly writing as well. Please feel free to do what you can. Anything that you have to say will help me out. And, yes, it is fairly easy for me to do the indexing that I am asking about below as long as I do it all together thanks to the joys of software that provides an indexing feature.

Note. If you have serious reservations on how entries are formatted, please tell me. I hope how I have done it is acceptable. I can change formatting now, but I will not change formatting later on. Currently entries for both ingredients and recipes are typicaly formatted as follows: 

A) Header containing vernacular name, English name, and almost always linean name in the case of ingredients.
B) The version of the text that I am working with annotated by exactly where it can be found.
C) A more or less accurate translation of the recipe.
D) (in some cases) A discussion section for ingredients which typically includes entries for uses mentioned for the ingredient mentioned in the usage list, but not appearing in the text. These proto-recipies are not repeated and would be indexed if folks decide that indexing recipes is a good idea.
(in some cases) A discussion about how to make a recipe or problems with the translation.
E) Yes, there are also footnotes. Over three hundred of them at last count. These include attributions, references to other parts of the work in question, the typical location for discussion about problems with translation, alternative ingredients, corrections to the published text (the reference text comes from a standard collection of old texts used by scholars, but I also have a facsimile paleographic copy which I have referred to on more than one occasion.) more discussion about ingredients, how to use them, &c. This is where seasonality, flavor profile, and time of introduction would most likely go. 

You have finally arrived at the question section of this note. Would you like included:

1. Information about ingredients commonly associated with the culture, but not appearing in the text. For example, a commonly available mushroom which does not appear in the section on mushrooms. Should this mushroom be integrated into the ingredient section on mushrooms? For example, add an entry in standard format for this mushroom at the end of the mushroom section with a note about when it appears in the target culture. There are also a few popular gourds and tubers that pretty much show up after 1600. This is one of the easiest approaches for me, but I don't know whether it would be acceptable to people in the historical culinary community.
2. Information about seasonality of ingredients.
3. Information about when ingredients entered the target culture (Yes, I have this information available to me about plants, and possibly a couple of other things as well.)
4. Information about flavor profiles. (Only when I have this available. I am not going to go out and sample endangered or unavailable species to do this.)
5. Should this additional information about ingredients be integrated into the seven sections on ingredients, or be collected into separate sections. And, if separate, how would these extra sections be best organized?
6. Should there be an index for ingredients? Should they be integrated into a general index or should they be indexed separately? If they are indexed, should the index be flat or should it be hierarchical with all of the mushrooms listed together under mushroom? Should each ingredient appear twice both in alphabetical order and in hierarchical sections within the same group.  Should ingredients be indexed by name in the text, by common English name (this is not always available), or by Scientific name (these change all the time and botanical classifications do not necessarily correspond to culinary classifications.) Should both the vernacular name and a common English name when available) appear in the index?

7. Should there be information about how to make various things either talked about in the original text itself or well known to have been fundamental to the food culture, but omitted by the original text. For example, the original has a section on: stocks, sauces, &c. should the additional sauces called for by the original text, but do not appear in the original, be grouped into this section, put into a completely different section, or omitted? A hybrid approach is of course possible. There may be some well known food and even fundamental food items which do not have an appropriate section in the original.

6. Discussion of food items now associated with the culture, but which are known to be modern. Yes, I asked the same question about ingredients, but this time I am asking about what people eat.
7. Information about premodern kitchens and equipment.
8. Information about culture specific cooking techniques. 
9. Information about: presentation, service, etiquette of the meal.
10. Information about meal sumptuary regulations.
11. Information about different types of meals and occasions for eating in the target culture.
12. Information about meal structure and planning.

And of course! Anything that I didn't think to ask about!!

Thank you very much for reading this very long note. I fervently hope that you will be able to help me out even a little bit.

Your Humble Servant
Solveig Throndardottir
Amateur Scholar