There’s a perennial debate in the SCA about what is “authentic” or “period” cooking. In the SCA context, “period” means “correct for the time period under study” which in my personal case is 10th Century Scandinavian. For the SCA in general that tends to mean “anything prior to 1625”. That’s a lot of food to choose from. Added to that is that fact that outside a very few documentary examples, we don’t have hardly any recipes. Particularly for “dark age” periods like mine. If only a small percentage of the population can write, they probably aren’t writing recipes.
Anyway, I’m a firm believer in the idea that you can create “period” food from two things, 1) studying the archaeological record, and 2) knowing how to cook. We have a very rich archaeological record available which for many times/places allows us to know exactly what foods were being eaten, how they were preserved, and what equipment was used to cook them. Add to those facts an understanding of food and cooking, and hey presto! you’ve got what I argue is “documentable” food. I gave a class on this subject at Estrella last week, and it seemed to be pretty well received. I had some very interesting people in my class including two practicing archaeologists, which was pretty cool.
On a (slightly) different note, there’s a debate currently raging on one of the SCA cooking lists about serving people food that they are “comfortable” with. There seem to be two broad areas of thought. One says that as an educational organization, it’s more valuable for us to introduce people to foods that they are probably unfamiliar with and thus broaden their horizons and educate them about the way our thinking about what is food have changed. The other says that what is really important is making people happy and “comfortable” and that is best achieved by picking “period” recipes that are most like familiar modern foods. This includes things like “macrows” which is essentially macaroni and cheese. While I have nothing against macaroni and cheese, I think serving only that kind of food at SCA feasts or other food gatherings is missing an educational opportunity. The education aspect of macrows is basically “the more things change…”. I’d rather make food that challenges our modern assumptions and opens people up to new possibilities.
On the other hand, what I certainly don’t advocate and wouldn’t tolerate is someone coming up with a whole menu of deliberately “challenging” foods. As in, “let’s see how weird we can be and freak everybody out”. That’s just egotistical and exclusivist. I don’t like that for the same reason that I never liked nouvelle cuisine back in the bad old 80’s. It makes people feel as if they are being left out if they don’t like it and that’s not what it should be about.
So, to try to bring that rant to some sort of reasonable conclusion, I’d advocate shooting for the middle way. Introduce people to new ideas, but don’t scare them away with stuff that’s deliberately outrageous. To pick an example from Ancient Roman cuisine, you’ll get much further with vinegared cucumbers with mint (not something many modern people would be familiar with) than you will with stuffed doormice. If you could find doormice anyway. Or stuff them.