Food History

One of the reasons I like the Absolute Write Blogchain is because you never know what the person before you is going to talk about. This means that every single time I participate, it give some new insights for my own life. Today, the insights may very well be for my own research and teaching as well.

Kat blogged immediately before me. She discussed how she micromanaged things on the home front. It all boiled down to how to give her six year old room and strength to grow and interest in learning. She does this through subduing the micromanaging impulse.

I get a lot of comments and queries about history from the general public. It’s very tempting to try to micromanage everyone’s knowledge through these questions and queries.

When I first started advising people about life past I wanted to do what was expected of me. What was expected of me was pots of information. The answers most people wanted to hear consisted of all the information they asked for but not a lot of the learning that I wanted to give. Underneath it all, I teach. What’s more, I get very fretful when people want data without the understanding necessary to interpret it.

Let me turn it foodie with an example. Say someone asks “Do you have a recipe for a Medieval pottage?” I can answer “Sure I do,” and just hand it over. Or I can answer “Why do you want it?” They explain they’re doing a re-creation of a peasant dish for a public occasion.
Giving them a recipe off the top of my head would make them happy, but it would be terrible history.

A better answer is that we don’t have any recipes for Medieval peasant dishes, but that we have some information concerning some ingredients and methods and can put what we know together to come up with something that would probably do the trick. This is where the answer really begins, because to find out what we know, the questioner needs to decide on when and where the peasant is living, what time of year it is (Medieval food being highly seasonal) and what level of prosperity they had. They have to sort out in their own minds that there are variations in foodways between peasants just as there are variations in foodways between you and me.

The micromanagement is finding out the real question that needs to be asked and to alert the questioner that answers may well require them to do some work. I’ve caused several people to huff off (truly, they huffed! I always thought that huffs belonged in romantic comedies till these folks did their thing) when they realise that their apparently simple questions would mean hours and hours of work on my part (work they didn’t want to do themselves) and that it was time to discuss payment terms*.

The economy of learning is quite different to the economy of knowledge and a mismatch can result in huffs, because we really don’t value history in the same monetary fashion we use to value economics. In the interface between the two, however, there is micromanagement.

My mind is still unclear on a great deal of this. I haven’t really sorted out how understanding and learning and knowledge and the need to make a living fit together. This is a beginning. Just a beginning. Maybe Samuel of So, You Majored in Creative Writing; Now what? can help sort it out further? Or maybe he’ll take us in an entirely different direction. Such is the nature of the blogchain.

(I’ll post a complete set of blogchain links separately, I think. And tomorrow maybe I’ll give you some more Regency recipes, since I’m not quite through the woods with whatever-it-is that’s wrong with me.)

* payment comes into my world when it concerns hours and hours that I could otherwise spend on my own research or writing fiction or earning money elsewhere - it took me ages to realise that other peoples’ access to my knowledge should not be put ahead my need to earn a living: I’m a slow learner.

food history, Medieval food, peasant food, blogchain, absolute write blogchain, teaching, AW blogchain 12, micromanaging