Thought of the wandering kind
If you were checking this page at exactly the right second, you would have noticed a timeslip. Saturday’s post appeared three days in advance, and has now gone back to its true home. Sneaky piece of writing.
One of the reasons many people are fond of reconstructions such as the Conflux banquets or those done by those cool people of the Tudor Kitchens project at Hampton Court is because there’s often a feel attached of playing with time.
Instead of stepping into a time machine, we pretend we’re elsewhen. Most of the time it’s not history we’re playing with, but with times that might have been. The history of our perfect dreams. Sometimes those dreams have a certain reality to them and sometimes they’re more like fantasy.
It’s like reading historical fiction and fantasy, except that we walk in the world, nibbling at a meat pie, or snacking on sweets.
For me, this dreaming is something else entirely. Part of me tells stories and part of me analyses them. When I analyse them, it’s to find out about people in the past and to help me to understand people in the present. Understanding is what it’s all about, really. Seeking the patterns of the past and making sense of them for the present. That’s the intellectual side.
Humans, however, are not made of intellect alone. The mouthfeel of a cake that has been five hundred years forgotten – that’s an emotional feel. Harder to analyse, because I’m still developing tools for it. Other people have tools – but I learned the historical styles based on text analysis and sight, not mouthfeel, so I’m working as hard as I can, finding out how I can link my brain with senses of smell and touch and taste.
Human worlds are moderated by our senses. This is why food history is so important. It’s another path to understanding. Added to more traditional approaches to history, it can illuminate and help the heart understand where we come from and maybe, just maybe, where we are going.
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