Historical Recipe Reconstruction Assignment

Notes directly related to the experiment

• Make note of how you are trying to remain as authentic as possible and what was lost where you were forced to cut corners
• Verb usage, origin of words
• significance of ingredients, religious or otherwise
• Selection of ingredients is paramount
• Explain the potential traps that could lessen authenticity and explain how they were mitigated as much as possible; similar to composite risk management?
• Adding ingredients incrementally until the appropriate result is obtained may be the best approach to a lot of problems (i.e. heat, water, seasoning, etc...)
• Address how you compensated for measurement and timing discrepancies
• What assumptions is the author making about its audience? The actual recipe is not even complete. It requires prior knowledge on how to prepare a tart for consumption.
• What tacit knowledge exists in the recipe?: How to make a tart. How to apply heat to the object. How to combine ingredients (which is interesting because so many other ingredients use a variety of verbs to describe this step)?
• Made an assumptions about the level of sophistication of EME cookery and kitchens that were quickly cleared up by viewing Scappi's culinary treatise Opera (1570):
  • did not think that they used metal - used metal in a very sophisticated manner
  • did not think that they refined their spices into powders due to a lack of technology - they did so with precision
  • Many of the instruments they used were exactly as we possessed. Our 'level of sophistication' was now the only question.
• Debate over which ginger to use. The fresh ginger seemed out of place considering the other spices. Since ginger was not indigenous to England it was certainly imported, but in what form, raw or powder. Subsequent research revealed that Ginger originated in South East Asia and was transported as a living rhizome to Europe and to other regions to be cultivated in the EME (Natural History Museum, Seeds of Trade, Online resource, http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/plants-fungi/seeds-of-trade/page.dsml?section=regions®ion_ID=6&page=spread&ref=spices [accessed 8 Sep 14]). The OED states that ginger is "The rhizome of the tropical plant Zingiber officinale, remarkable for its hot spicy taste; used when dried and ground in cookery and as a medicine; also preserved in syrup or candied as a sweetmeat" (OED, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/78372?rskey=XuayJD&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid). Based on the OED entry we felt safe in using ground ginger.
• Forming the paste was a significant obstacle. The recipe mentions nothing about this process. We had to infer from other contemporary recipes
• What dish or base for cooking do we need to use? Porcelain or glass dish as is common today? We used a metal pot as was pictured in Scappi's Opera (1570)
• The primary recipe specifies no measurements, however the secondary recipe for the dough does
  • "a quart of the finest flower”
    • A quart was taken to be equivalent to one modern quart of the English system for measuring volume. More research could have been done into the evolution and variations with respect to measurements in the EME, unfortunately time constraints did not allow this. Every effort there after was taken to ensure that proportions were maintained with the quart measurement in mind.
  • “a little cold water”
    • the exact amount was impossible to discern from this description, so we decided that when it came time to add the water we would do so a minute amount at time and keep doing so until we gained the desired effect. EME cooks must of created their own system to deal with the ambiguity of recipes. Did a need for standardization arise out of this? Could a multiplicity of cook all working from the same book have given rise to the need for standardized measurements?
  • “small peeces of butter as big as Nuts”.
    • at first we struggled to decide on which kind of nut we were expected to model (walnuts, almonds, etc...). We eventually decided on a hazelnut, as this falls into a middle range of nut sizes, in our opinion.

• Assay #1 & 2 concurrently
  • The dough was created first
    • a quart of flour, two egg yolks and one egg white were added to a bowl and mixed;
    • small amounts of cold water (tap cold) were added to the bowl until the paste obtained the desired consistency as judged by us (we felt that the paste need only be malleable enough for the addition of the butter;
    • the paste was removed from the bowl and placed on a counter top that had been sprinkled with flour. Neither recipe makes any mention of flouring the counter top or the rolling pin, however this was done any attempt to mild the dough with the rolling pin would have created a condition where the dough became uncontrollable;
    • per the instructions, butter was added to the dough and it was refolded over ten times;
    • found that the temperature of the butter mattered when rolling. If the butter was too cold then the butter would not work into the dough; too hot and it became unmanageable and tore the dough during rolling. After a few tears we cooled the butter in the freezer and continued with the process. (In retrospect, freezing the butter should not have been done. We should have tried to find a solution outside of a modern instrument. It would have been better if we simply worked with the butter at the temperature it was. That need to innovate could have given us a better insight into how an early modern cook could have dealt with the problem. Unfortunately, this became a missed opportunity.)
    • In total ¾ of a cup of butter was used to make the dough.
  • The jelly was then created
    • the reconstituted rose hips were placed in a mixing bowl;
    • Sugar was added in small increments until the taste was pleasing, in our own judgement. A total of ⅔ of a cup was used;
    • Cinnamon was slowly added until the taste was pleasing. A total of 3 tsp. were used;
    • Ginger was slowly added until the taste was pleasing. A total of 3 tsp. were used;
      • Emily was responsible at first for adding the cinnamon and ginger. She kept doing to until she stated 'I can't tell if I have put enough in'. At a certain point her ability to smell and taste became overwhelmed and she could no longer tell if her incremental additions. To rectify this she asked me to take over the addition of these seasons.
    • Nutmeg was then added, WAIT A MINUTE, STOP!!!!!
      • No where in the recipe does it say anything about nutmeg, yet we both had participated in the preparation, photographing, and grinding of Nutmeg in preparation for the jelly. This oversight made it all the way through our process, to the bowl and in. Luckily, we caught it in time to remove the nutmeg from the bowl without losing any material amount of the jelly. The incident has been officially dubbed "the Nutmeg Debacle of 2014".
  • 
    
  • Once the Jelly was prepared, the dough was rolled out thin enough as too provide us with two attempts at making a tart. Due to our prior discussion on whether or not the tart was open faced or closed face we decided to make two tarts: one open-faced and in a pan another closed cooked on a flat surface.
• The tarts were then placed in the oven as a temperature that we thought would be reasonably hot to cook the tarts. The measured temperature turned out to be around 350 degrees. The tarts were checked every five minutes for signs of being cooked and were removed when we judged them to be done. The open-faced tart cooked for 35 mins and the closed face version took 50 mins to cook.
• The tarts are, hopefully, ready to eat.

HRR Assignment Presentation (Emily Boyd and Jef Palframan) 8 Sep 14.pptx

Notes indirectly related to the experiment

• Thomas Dawson:
  • No information on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; genealogical search (familysearch.org) indicates that a Thomas Dawson was born in 1580 in Cottingham, Yorkshire, England and died in 1620. No confirmation if this is the same person, however the death dates match.
  • Investigation into Cottingham may bear more fruit on the food culture that existed there, however this is doubtful.
  • why would TD write a book directed at 'good wives'? the title page seems to suggest that his intention lie in aiding married couples "Also certain approved point of husbandry, very necessarie for al Husbandmen to know".
  • More than likely he saw a market among women and directed his efforts there. This book was reprinted in 1596 and in 1610. He also wrote another part to 'the good housewives' in 1597 and 'A book of cookery' which was published in 1620 and reprinted in 1629 and 1650.
  • Was he selling his own intellectual property or cultivating his image? how did this function beyond the book it self? what other methods were used to promote himself? Book tour vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton? or something similar;
  • on page 20 of the book is located a recipe called "To make a tart that is a courage to a man or woman", courage meaning aphrodisiac. More evidence that marriage is definitely a concern of his.
• Due to the need to document and photograph the process, one person (Emily) was designated the cook while the other was designated the recorder (Me)
• So what? What did we learn by preforming this reconstruction?
  • As good as our intentions may be, the process of experiential learning demands that we follow the recipe to the letter. Even if difficulties arise we must ensure that we find authentic solutions to these problems. When challenges are perceived as mistakes we run the risk of injecting modern technologies or solutions into the reconstruction;
  • Honing our attention to detail is essential to executing the recipe successfully. The mysterious addition of nutmeg shows that human memory, action, and planning are completely fallible;
  • The process to cook a tart involves many activities both inside and outside the kitchen;

General Observations and Questions

• Reconstruction is an interpretation; it is impossible to reproduce the experience absolutely, we can only get so close.
• "There is a danger that by concentrating effort on making the end-product convincing, it might be possible -- either deliberately or subconsciously -- to subordinate the process of reconstruction" (Stinjnman in Clarke, 5)
• Consideration must be given to streamlining work flow and dividing up the division of labor; production of ingredients and inputs is extremely labor intensive, one person could not produce the historical 'object' themselves; a series of relationships was required to accomplish this feat (Feat is the correct noun); the cook or artisan become the focal point for so much activity related to labor and capital that he/she can cultivate a lot of social and intellectual power; Is this where professions get their power? Not so much from the action of the individual, but through the network of interconnected political, agricultural, social and economic systems they command.
• the cook is more of an assembler rather than a producer; refinements and production ingredients can go as far as being an international concern (i.e. the importation of spices and staples)
• labor as an input of production could have been a threat or
• Since inputs are not a decided by the assembler (they cannot conceive or their own tastes, like a painter only has a set number of basic colours that he can combine and manipulate), the unique intellectual efforts (i.e. the combination of flavours, processes and presentation) become the sellable property of the individual;
• how is this type of intellectual property protected in the EME with plagiarism being so common?
• if a society developed to the point where they could produce leisure time and allowed consumption to serve more than the daily dietary requirement then the market for food experiences must then be said to been created. Who and how did the cook come to enter this market? What lead a food preparer to attempt to experiment? What role did women play in this? Hunter/gatherer culture? Not an anthropologist, cannot assume for certain who was preparing food in H/G cultures.