Subject: Re: Sweet Potatoes

From: Robert And Cynthia Chiovoloni <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 94 08:36:31 -0500

david director friedman <[email-masked]> writes:
 
>On a slightly different angle ... . If you have a medieval recipe
>using a particular ingredient, then (subject to possible translation
>errors) that is good evidence that the ingredient was available in
>the middle ages. If you do not have a period recipe, then even if the
>ingredient is period, the meal isn't. The difference between two
>cuisines is not merely a matter of ingredients. A French cook in
 
This point cannot be overemphasized.  One thing that follows from it is that
while the ingredients that are available to any cuisine as it develops are of
the utmost importance, they style that emerges as they are cooked becomes
equally essential.
It has been pointed out in many places that the relative lack of firewood in
China determined that food would be cut into small pieces and cooked quickly
there.From my own experience, it see
med clear to me while I was living in
Turkey that the fact that so much of the traditional Turkish diet was based on
food that could be cooked quickly over coals on a skewer(or sword, I suppose)
was shaped byt their nomadic history.
None of this is terribly profound but I think the effect extends to much
subtler areas. Maybe the point is that there seem to be relatively few really
different recipes in any given cuisine.  What cooks do--what I know I do--is
apply the same c
ooking method over and over again to different items.  Of course, you must make
alterations, sometimes profound ones to account for the different ingredients,
but there is often quite a similarity in the WAY things are cooked.  Given the
relatively limit
ed "palate"(no pun intended) of techniques a cook has to prepare a dish it is
no wonder that national styles emerge. It should go without saying that the
array of techniques the cooks in a given cuisine have at their disposal is shape
d by the foods that are in abundance for them to cook.
R.C.