What Am I Cooking

Yesterday, Sunday, June 9, I taught my first University of Atlantia class. I taught a rough draft of this class at Baronial A&S night about a month ago, but this was online and lot more structured. This is the first time I've taught at University, even though I've been involved in other ways, including currently being on staff as External Communications Lead.

When I lived in Caid I was also quite active with Collegium Caidis, including running the Target Archery track for multiple years as Regent of the Academy of Archers. During that time I taught a lot of archery classes. This was my also my first non-archery class.

I learned a lot preparing for this class. I took a simple recipe, one that has been translated many times and went back to the original source. In this research, I found that the recipe I was looking at had a second line that was not mentioned in any of the modern translations! While it doesn't make a huge difference, it did change my understanding of the recipe and the ingredients.

I referenced four cookbooks that I had on my shelves already, all different translations of the same recipe from Le Ménagier De Paris. I had a few other books and some websites I could have used as well. They all had the same English translation of the first paragraph, but the second did not appear anywhere I looked. Out of the four books I reviewed, only one alluded to it in their redaction of the recipe, the others left it out completely.

That one line changed my understanding of the recipe. It is also changed how I look at a lot of modern interpretations. Source documents are important! This one little exercise in redaction completely changed my recipe.

Here are the class notes:

Class Notes Link

July 16, 2024 update:

I taught this class again for the Barony of Marinus. This time I asked someone to cook the recipe as they interpreted it from the Maggie Black British Museum Book. I cook the recipe from my redaction. What we came up with were two entirely different dishes that were both delicious but you wouldn't guess they were from the same recipe. The flavor/spice profile, type of mushrooms, type of crusts, type of cheeses were all different.

This added an additional level of depth to the class that was really appreciated. Looking at different interpretations versus the original recipe when you're eating samples of both was a great contrast.

December 18, 2024 update:

I taught this class again for the Newcomer Symposium held by the Kingdom of Calontir on 11/30/24. There should be a recording of this class. There were a lot of good questions and things that I will update before I teach this class again at Winter University 2025.