Not food history
This week I’m trying some experiments with heart and goat mince. Not together, you understand. And also not historical.
The ‘not historical’ in important. Too often people tell me that they cooked something medieval or they created a great peasant stew from the nineteenth century. Ask a couple of questions and I discover that any older-sounding ingredient must be Medieval and any stew with no recipe has absolutely to be nineteenth century peasant. I wish I knew what to say at that point in a conversation. I used to probe further for sources, but now I stutter and um and ah and hope that the well-intentioned cook is joking. Invariably, they’re not. I need a special etiquette for handling these situations, I suspect. I need the same set of instructions for when entirely nice people tell me with great sincerity that they have a deep understanding of the Medieval Arthur because they have read Mists of Avalon three times. I need an entirely better system for dealing with those who believe that Druids were round in thirteenth century England.
You can see how easily led astray I am when I worry about people not understanding the difference between what actually happened in a period and the popular understand of what might have happened in a period. Today that means that lots of people probably made interesting historical dishes in various places and times, using goat’s meat or using lamb’s heart. I’m not making any of them this week. I’m looking at modern recipes and thinking about how to adapt them and then producing something entirely unexpected. It’s a great deal of fun, but it’s not historical cooking.
Leave a Reply