[Sca-cooks] An SCA feast

[Laureen Hart]

Some of us are documentation fans, some are not.
The breaking point is where we fans say "There are no period recipes" and the non-fans *Hear* "That isn't period".
We know they ate bread, stew, and numerous other things that we do not have documentable recipes for.
For me, the problem is when someone refers to the undocumented bits as "period".
(Or- If they had a Bic lighter, they would have used one.)

As Bear says, it is about verisimilitude. 
Most of us fans make the choice to use period ingredients and do the best we can to fill in where there is no documentation.
We don't decide we can't serve bread at the feast because we don't have a recipe.
We also don't decide that just because we don't have documentation we can just whip up a Bisquick Dill Surprise.

In Madrone (An Tir) we have a Peasants festival every year. We serve a hearty Soup/Stew.
Sure - we have little specific documentation for Peasant stew.
But (to me) it would be just as wrong to serve "Noble Person" food to our Peasants as it would be to use russet potatoes.
Having a recipe for the wrong thing isn't necessarily better than having no recipe.

As a documentation fan I don't understand why others don't care to produce as close a period feast as they can.
I am sure a religious documentation fan probably doesn't understand why I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
We all play the game in our own way. Tolerance is hard, especially when someone is massacring something we work hard on, or care passionately about.

(Let's not even start with the "We don't want period food, we want edible food" heathens.)

Randell Raye

-----Original Message-----
From: Sca-cooks [mailto:sca-cooks-bounces+lhart=graycomputer.com at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of Terry Decker
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2016 6:24 AM
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] An SCA feast

You are making the mistake of seeing an SCA feast as an exercise in historical cooking.  It isn't.  It is an exercise in verisimilitude.  It's meant to emulate medieval dining and help the attendees stay in the medieval mood.  There are those of us who extend this by preparing historical recipes, but we don't usually follow the religious restrictions that would have been in place for our feasts.

There was a comment posted on this list about the preparation of historical recipes that stressed the opposite side of this, speaking of rigid adherence to the recipe which also ignores the feast as an exercise in verisimilitude. 
It was, I believe, a complaint about my modifying recipes to meet various dietary restrictions.  In my defense, I would point out that the period cook had to produce pleasing dishes that met the health requirements of their patrons, so my modifications are in keeping with both historical practice and expanding the verisimilitude.

Bragg MacMorrichai is obviously ignorant of your predilection to ask questions and provide advice.  Since a quick search doesn't provide anything under that name, she appears to be new to the SCA.  Cut her some slack.  As a culinary historian, maybe we can pick her brain.

Looking at the menu, I would suggest that you encourage Diana Wertz to think about preparing actual period fare for her next feast.

Remember verisimilitude, if the feast isn't period, they aren't problems, just rough places that need to be smoothed to make a more historically correct offering.

As for your other questions, the menu is "perioid."  Without the recipes, it is difficult to determine how close they come to historical recipes.  No stuffed mushrooms that I can recall, but I would serve either mushroom tart or Martino's mushroom recipe.  Very flakey pastry is possible, but a period meat pie would generally use a hot water and rye coffin.  Assorted drinks is how you deal with not being able to serve many of the period drinks.  The assorted desserts is of interest to me, since it doesn't convey what they are.

I'm not on Facebook, so if you want to re-post this over there feel free.

Now, back to 16th Century German.  I got a couple recipes to test.

Bear