(This topic has been bugging me for a while to be set down in print form, and are my own opinions, so please take with a grain of salt)
I’ve been cooking professionally for over 20 years, and grew up in a household were cooking was a major part of daily life. My mother was a cook for over 40 years, and I even married into the business, as my husband also has over 20 years of professional cooking experience.
When I first joined the SCA, one of the first Arts that interested me was cooking and working with period recipes. I quickly started to amass a collection of period cookbooks, and once I married the collection expanded even more. I’ve done a number of feasts within the Society, and one of the questions I constantly hear is “where is your redaction of the period recipe?”
My answer tends to be, “I don’t have one”. This tends to confuse a number of people, as they can’t imagine cooking straight from a period source, without all the modern conveniences of amounts, oven temperatures, & cooking times. Cooking, when truly done, should be a matter of instinct and taste, and not the following of rote recipes.
One must remember that the cookbooks in period were not written for the mass market and home cook, as they are today. They were written by cooks for other cooks, mainly as an aid to memory. That is why, in my opinion, so many people today tend to shy away from using period cooking sources as is. There’s none of the modern recipe look to a period recipe, and most folks don’t even know where to start off, even though a period recipe is rather straightforward in what ingredients are used and what needs to be done, and in what order.
I find the modern equivalent to period recipes in the recipes that have been handed down in families for years. A lot of these recipes may only say “use x and x and x, and cook until it is done”. Sure does sound like a period recipe to me.
My best advice to truly learning to cook from period recipes is to just jump right in and try it! Learn to trust your instincts and your skills, and you’ll find that by practice and trial and error, that using a period source “as is” will become easier to you. Forget what the “star” chefs of today will tell you, and trust yourself.
And as the Mad French Chef on Good Eats would say “Cook it until it is done”!
