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their  original medieval creations are usually either modern ethnic dishes or modified versions
of standard modern recipes.
Even if  creative medieval cookery is done by taking period recipes and modifying them, it is a
risky business. Unless the cook has extensive experience cooking medieval recipes in their
original form, he is likely to modify them in the direction of modern tastes in order to make
them fit better his ideas of what they should be like. But one of the attractions of medieval
cooking is that it lets us discover things we do not expect combinations of spices, or ways of
preparing dishes, that seem strange to modern tastes yet turn out to be surprisingly good.
I would therefore advise anyone interested in medieval cooking to try to keep as closely as
possible to the original recipe. There may, of course, be practical difficulties that prevent you
from following the recipe exactly ingredients you cannot obtain, cooking methods you cannot
use ( hang it in a chimney where a fire is kept all the year ), or the like. But I do not think it is
ever desirable, when first cooking a dish, to change it merely because you suspect that if you
follow the recipe you will not like the result. The people who wrote the recipes down knew a
great deal more about period cookery than we do; it is our job to be their students, not their
teachers.
Period, Ethnic, and Traditional
There is some tendency for people in the Society to assume that all ethnic food is period. Thus,
for example,  oriental feasts generally consist of dishes that one would find in a modern
Chinese or Japanese restaurant. On the same principle, traditional or  peasant cooking is
sometimes included in feasts, even when there is no evidence that the particular dishes were
made in period.
The assumption is a dangerous one; America is not the only place where things change over
time. The fact that a dish was made by your grandmother, or even that she says she got it from
her grandmother, may be evidence that the dish is a hundred years old; it is not evidence that it
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dates from before 1600. While traditional societies may appear very old-fashioned to us, there is
ample evidence that such societies in general, and their cooking in particular, change over time.
Potatoes are an important part of traditional cooking in Ireland, and tomatoes in Italy. Yet both
are New World vegetables; they could not have been used before 1492, and were not in common
use in Europe until a good deal later than that.
If we had no sources for medieval recipes, foreign or traditional dishes would be more suited to
our feasts than hamburgers and french fries or Coke and pizza; even if they are not actually
medieval, they at least help create the feeling that we are no longer in our normal Twentieth
Century world. Similarly, if we had no sources for period dance, modern folk dances would fit
into an event better than disco dancing. Since we do have sources for both period recipes and
period dances, there seems no good reason to use out-of-period substitutes.
Late Period and Out of Period Foodstuffs
To do period cooking, it is desirable to avoid ingredients that were not available to period cooks.
 Period, for the purposes of the SCA, is defined as pre-seventeenth century. Since most of the
ingredients that are available now and were not available during the Middle Ages came into use
between 1500 and 1700, it is not always easy to know which of them were available by the year
1600.
One solution is to avoid all of the new ingredients, thus, in effect, moving the cutoff date back to
about 1492. This makes a good deal of sense as a way of learning what early cooking was like.
We already know what a cuisine that includes the new foodstuffs is like it is all around us. If we
restrict ourselves to ingredients that were available throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, we are likely to learn a good deal more about how period cooking differed from
modern cooking than if we include in our cooking anything that might possibly have been in use
somewhere in Europe by late December of 1600.
While there is much to be said for such a voluntary restriction, nothing in the rules or customs of
the Society requires it of all cooks. Those who are willing to use late foodstuffs, providing they
were in use by 1600, are left with the problem of determining which ones meet that requirement.
This article is an attempt to do so.
Corn, potatoes, cocoa, vanilla, peppers  essentially the whole list of New World foods were
used in the New World long before Columbus. Since almost all Society personae are from the
Old World, it seems reasonable to limit ourselves to foods that came into use in the Old World
before 1600. A further argument in favor of doing so is that we have so far as I know no Aztec
cookbooks.1 Although potatoes were eaten during the fifteenth century, they were not eaten in
the dishes for which we have fifteenth century recipes.
Most of our period feasts are based on the cooking of a very limited part of the Old World.
Almost all period cookbooks used in the Society are either Western European or Islamic. For the
purposes of this article I will therefore be mainly concerned with the availability of foods in
Western Europe prior to the year 1600 more precisely, with the question of what foods were
sufficiently well known so that they might plausibly have been served at a feast.
In trying to determine which foods were available in Western Europe before 1600, I have relied
1
There are, however, descriptions by early travellers of what the natives of the New World ate and how they
prepared it. References can be found in Finan and Coe.
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on a variety of sources. They include the Oxford English Dictionary (used primarily to determine
when and in what context the English name of a food was first used hereafter OED), cookbooks,
and secondary sources including the Larousse Gastronomique (LG) and the Encyclopedia
Britannica, 11th edition (EB).
Most of the new foodstuffs of the sixteenth and seventeenth century came from the New World,
but there were some important exceptions. I will start with them.
Coffee
The coffee plant is apparently native to Abyssinia. The use of coffee in Abyssinia was recorded
in the fifteenth century and regarded at that time as an ancient practice (EB). I believe that there
is a reference in one of the Greek historians to what sounds like coffee being drunk in what
might well be Abyssinia, but I have not yet succeeded in tracking it down.
Coffee was apparently introduced into Yemen from Abyssinia in the middle of the 15th century.
It reached Mecca in the last decade of the century and Cairo in the first decade of the 16th
century (Hattox).
The use of coffee in Egypt is mentioned by a European resident near the end of the sixteenth
century. It was brought to Italy in 1615 and to Paris in 1647 (LG). The first coffee house in
England was opened in Oxford in 1650 (Wilson), and the first one in London in 1652 (EB). The
earliest use of the word in English is in 1592, in a passage describing its use in Turkey (OED) .
It appears that coffee is out of period for European feasts and late period for Islamic ones.
Tea
The use of tea in China and Ceylon goes back to prehistoric times. According to the Larousse, it
was brought to Europe by the Dutch in 1610 and to England in 1644. According to the OED, it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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