Sunday, February 14, 2010

Modern value of cooks... than medieval reality...

More in relation to modern portrayal of Feasts in medieval and renaissance times...

Last night, in a few hours of wake, I set out to read all I can about cooks guilds within the SCA period and instead spent a majority of that time reading about how horrible cooks are! Can 5, maybe 7, books be wrong? Actually... it's the references but those came up to a similar number.
It seems those mainly into literature and theatre say cooks played special parts because of the likeness of kitchen to hell... I can see that, though the culinary historians look at a bigger picture where cooks, indeed, were said to be the work of the devil. Very interesting when looking at it in a soul vs body kind of way and not so surprising when looking at quality of product sort of way.
Oddly, one writer focused on documents showing the cook at fault but drew only little attention to butchers at fault (for which there is plenty of documentation to support) BUT I found this refreshing as I was in want to know where else they obtained their protein not-so-goodness. Though, somewhat amusingly, I have already read about pastry-shop ills and enforcements, but none so early or from an English standpoint... kinda "nice"? to know the problem was wide spread... actually that isn't nice, but good to know.

Overall... and back on the topic I meant to be on...
Cooks seem to come in few classes... the awesomely and well written ones who worked in great households, those well employed in pretty damn good households, and everyone else... deplorable and filthy (or so they were described).
In the SCA, we do at least value our master cooks but "nobodies" are highly valued as well... heck, we hire people from guilds or right off the streets to cook our feasts... we basically have caterers for even the most highly esteemed feasts and guests.
Of course there isn't anything wrong with that...
Just had me thinking about how different SCA life is from medieval life... perhaps a reminder of why we should not base our period assumptions on modern ones...
Something I see often when it comes to assumptions of what poor-er medieval people ate or how they must have cooked everything... usually based on modern perceptions...

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