![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In Other Cooking News
Oct. 11th, 2009 08:44 amI've been hammering away at the Cookbook Project for most of a year now, and while it's been fun and interesting and educational, in some ways it's kind of made it hard for me to remember that there are other aspects of cooking and baking that I love, too.
Modern cooking is cool, and, well, necessary for survival. And it's something that I enjoy doing. But I have to admit that I also share a deep love for historical cooking, particularly SCA period. (I know that's not particularly narrowing it down at all, but I do have some colonial and frontier-period cookbooks, and while they're keen, they're close enough to modern that they don't quite feed my jones for historical cooking.) When I joined the SCA my primary interests were dance and theater, and I still adore both of those things, but somewhere along the line I wound up in a kitchen, and I've reached the point where now that's the most natural place for me to be at an event.
In particular, I love the mystery and puzzle-solving of the recipe hunt. There's something indescribably fun about being told that a particular menu needs an onion dish and being able to turn to a cookbook in a foreign language, flip through my translation of the index, find two or three, translate them on the fly (I hadn't realized my Italian had gotten good enough to do that, but apparently it has), and pick out the best-looking option, then fool around with a friend trying to figure out how best to turn the suggestions and ideas there into tasty food.
It fills both my need for experimentation and... well, making stuff up as I go, I guess, too. When I'm cooking modern food, I tend to follow recipes pretty closely. I'll make simple changes - swap out real sour cream for low-fat, or basil for cilantro; I'll leave out ingredients I can't stand or add a spice or two that I think is missing, but other than that I do my best to follow the instructions. In a lot of period cooking, though, the instructions are at best vague. Some cookbooks have very precise amounts and details, but many don't, and even the ones that do then reference tools and equipment I may not have, or end up with instructions like 'cook with a long slow fire above and below until done.' The end result is that, at least the first time through a new recipe, there's a lot of guessing and tasting and asking opinions of anyone nearby as to what the best way to proceed might be. And it's a license to fly by the seat of my pants and just trust my instincts and play, instead of neatly and carefully trusting someone else to know better than I do.
There's a sense of accomplishment in opening a modern cookbook and making, say, the perfect gingerbread biscotti or chicken picatta and serving them to friends. But when I can take the recipe from gibberish to food, by myself or with friends, it's an even more amazing transformation, and the feeling of having Done Something Cool is overwhelming. I'm lucky to have fallen into such fascinating hobbies, with such good people to share them with.....
Modern cooking is cool, and, well, necessary for survival. And it's something that I enjoy doing. But I have to admit that I also share a deep love for historical cooking, particularly SCA period. (I know that's not particularly narrowing it down at all, but I do have some colonial and frontier-period cookbooks, and while they're keen, they're close enough to modern that they don't quite feed my jones for historical cooking.) When I joined the SCA my primary interests were dance and theater, and I still adore both of those things, but somewhere along the line I wound up in a kitchen, and I've reached the point where now that's the most natural place for me to be at an event.
In particular, I love the mystery and puzzle-solving of the recipe hunt. There's something indescribably fun about being told that a particular menu needs an onion dish and being able to turn to a cookbook in a foreign language, flip through my translation of the index, find two or three, translate them on the fly (I hadn't realized my Italian had gotten good enough to do that, but apparently it has), and pick out the best-looking option, then fool around with a friend trying to figure out how best to turn the suggestions and ideas there into tasty food.
It fills both my need for experimentation and... well, making stuff up as I go, I guess, too. When I'm cooking modern food, I tend to follow recipes pretty closely. I'll make simple changes - swap out real sour cream for low-fat, or basil for cilantro; I'll leave out ingredients I can't stand or add a spice or two that I think is missing, but other than that I do my best to follow the instructions. In a lot of period cooking, though, the instructions are at best vague. Some cookbooks have very precise amounts and details, but many don't, and even the ones that do then reference tools and equipment I may not have, or end up with instructions like 'cook with a long slow fire above and below until done.' The end result is that, at least the first time through a new recipe, there's a lot of guessing and tasting and asking opinions of anyone nearby as to what the best way to proceed might be. And it's a license to fly by the seat of my pants and just trust my instincts and play, instead of neatly and carefully trusting someone else to know better than I do.
There's a sense of accomplishment in opening a modern cookbook and making, say, the perfect gingerbread biscotti or chicken picatta and serving them to friends. But when I can take the recipe from gibberish to food, by myself or with friends, it's an even more amazing transformation, and the feeling of having Done Something Cool is overwhelming. I'm lucky to have fallen into such fascinating hobbies, with such good people to share them with.....
