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are an important part of traditional cooking in Ireland, and tomatoes in Italy. Yet both are New
World vegetables; they could not have been used before 1492 and were not in common use in
Europe until a good deal later than that.
If we had no sources for medieval recipes, foreign or traditional dishes would be more suited
to our feasts than hamburgers and french fries or Coke and pizza; even if they are not actually
medieval, they at least help create the feeling that we are no longer in our normal Twentieth
Century world. Similarly, if we had no sources for period dance, modern folk dances would fit
into an event better than disco dancing. Since we do have sources for both period recipes and
period dances, there seems no good reason to use out-of-period substitutes.
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Late Period and Out of Period Foodstuffs
To do period cooking, it is desirable to avoid ingredients that were not available to period
cooks. “Period,” for the purposes of the SCA, is defined as pre-seventeenth century. Since most
of the ingredients that are available now and were not available during the Middle Ages came into
use between 1500 and 1700, it is not always easy to know which of them were available by the
year 1600.
One solution is to avoid all of the new ingredients, thus, in effect, moving the cutoff date back
to about 1492. This makes a good deal of sense as a way of learning what early cooking was like.
We already know what a cuisine that includes the new foodstuffs is like–it is all around us. If we
restrict ourselves to ingredients that were available throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, we are likely to learn a good deal more about how period cooking differed from
modern cooking than if we include in our cooking anything that might possibly have been in use
somewhere in Europe by late December of 1600.
While there is much to be said for such a voluntary restriction, nothing in the rules or customs
of the Society requires it of all cooks. Those who are willing to use late foodstuffs, providing they
were in use by 1600, are left with the problem of determining which ones meet that requirement.
This article is an attempt to do so.
Corn, potatoes, cocoa, vanilla, peppers–essentially the whole list of New World foods–were
used in the New World long before Columbus. Since almost all Society personae are from the
Old World, it seems reasonable to limit ourselves to foods that came into use in the Old World
before 1600. A further argument in favor of doing so is that we have–so far as I know–no Aztec
cookbooks, although there are descriptions by early travellers of what the natives of the New
World ate and how they prepared it; references can be found in Finan and Coe. Although potatoes
were eaten in South America during the fifteenth century, they were not eaten in the dishes for
which we have fifteenth century recipes.
Most of our period feasts are based on the cooking of a very limited part of the Old World.
Almost all period cookbooks used in the Society are either Western European or Islamic. For the
purposes of this article I will therefore be mainly concerned with the availability of foods in
Western Europe prior to the year 1600–more precisely, with the question of what foods were
sufficiently well known so that they might plausibly have been served at a feast.
In trying to determine which foods were available in Western Europe before 1600, I have
relied on a variety of sources. They include the Oxford English Dictionary (used primarily to
determine when and in what context the English name of a food was first used–hereafter OED),
cookbooks, and secondary sources including the Larousse Gastronomique (LG) and the
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition (EB).
Most of the new foodstuffs of the sixteenth and seventeenth century came from the New
World, but there were some important exceptions. I will start with them.