Cooking
Period-style cooking is a big part of many SCA events (feasts being one obvious example :)
Many period dishes are simple to prepare and only require ingredients that can be found in any supermarket. Remember that many foods we eat today didn't exist during period and their presence is noticable (to some people at any rate)
There are many ways to participate in recreating medieval cooking. You can join your local cooks guild, cook for a few SCA friends following a medieval recipe, or cook period food over an open fire at a camping event. When using period recipes, you might have to make a lot of interpretative assumptions about what the recipe meant; in the SCA, revising a recipe to include these assumptions in a modern format is sometimes called "redacting", though outside of this context that word has a different meaning.
Books
Several good books have been written with period and period-style (cf. Period vs. Period-Style) cooking. Among these are:
- Take a Thousand Eggs or More
- An excellent source in two volumes. The first contains originals, redactions & recipes; the second contains originals with redactions, but no modern recipes.
- A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye
- Originals & redactions from a 16th century cookbook.
- Pleyn Delit
- An excellent collection of original and interpreted period recipes. Highly recommended.
There is also the website Gode Cookery, which contains many period, period-style and periodoid recipes. There is also the website Celtnet Recipes, which has a large number of period recipes and their redactions.
See Also:
