[Sca-cooks] true medieval bread recipes

[David Friedman]

[I sent this yesterday but it doesn't seem to have gone through, I think 
because it was too long, so I'm splitting it into two messages]

Part I

On 9/22/16 4:43 PM, Susan Lord wrote:

> My life became like Julia and Julie because next I found myself 
> copying medieval recipes that I had not tried. Next, I started trying 
> the I recipes but unlike the movie, I have plenty that failed. I tried 
> correcting many two, three and more times and they failed again. 
I think my record would be between ten and fifteen tries. The reason 
they failed was that I knew what sesame oil was. Sesame oil was a dark, 
strongly flavored oil used in Chinese cooking. Making a dough from that 
for Khushkananaj produced a result that I could, with some effort, make 
edible. Barely.

Eventually I was in a Middle-eastern grocery store and noticed that 
their sesame oil was a light yellowish liquid. Investigating further, I 
discovered that Chinese sesame oil is made from toasted sesame seeds and 
used as a condiment, middle eastern from untoasted and used as a cooking 
oil. Once I corrected that mistake the recipe worked. It became a 
favorite and I have made it many times in the decades since.

If a recipe doesn't work after multiple tries, you are probably doing 
something wrong. The reason might be a scribal error in your source, it 
might be an error in interpreting the source as in my mistake with 
sesame oil. One thing worth trying is to find a similar recipe in 
another source from the same cuisine. You might find sharing such 
problems here useful, since there may be someone else who has 
encountered the same or a related recipe.
> Sometimes I gave up and published them as is true to the original 
> text. Then I started to feel like I owed my readers a recipe on which 
> they could depend. As of to date I have over1,000 blogs published so I 
> don’t remember each and every one but most of the recipes did turn out 
> pretty well for a non-professional I think. 
Having the recipes turn out well is one requirement. But if what you 
have is not a period recipe but a recipe you have invented with a few 
features in common with a period recipe, telling people it is a period 
recipe misleads them. If the best you can manage is "we know they had 
things of this sort and here is a thing of this sort they could have 
made" you use that, but then you have to make it clear to others that 
that is what it is.

-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/