redaction

Note (May 18 2017): Since this was published I’ve been thinking about the terms we use. Commonly in the SCA the recreation of a period recipe with modern measurements has been called a redaction. I’m not sure why though, but the word has been used as long as the SCA’s been using the internet. I’ve come across SCA recipes calling themselves redaction as far back as 1995 and even one that may have been from ’93. Now that is of course an allowed use of the term, OED lists definition 1b as “The action or process of revising or editing text, esp. in preparation for publication; (also) an act of editorial revision.” So it’s not completely wrong. But I haven’t been able to find a use of it outside the SCA for culinary uses. Mistress Kataryna brought up that it’s used in recreating music and sometimes in bringing together multiple texts to recreate what the original text was  in English literature, but I suspect the use of the word in the SCA has gone beyond its definition. Because of that I’m now switching instead to ‘recreation’ ‘reconstruction’ and ‘interpretation’, though I may still use ‘redaction’ occasionally. However this article will remain as it is with no changes as the term ‘redaction’ is still in common use in the SCA.

Redacting a period recipe yourself is the backbone of period cooking. It lets you get the feel of how people in your chosen time period felt about cooking, how they talked about cooking, and lets you adapt within the framework of the original recipe rather than someone else’s adaptation.

With that in mind I have three rules for redacting:

Rule one: context matters
Rule two: a single recipe proves nothing
Rule three: don’t be afraid of experimenting

To walk you through the basics of redacting I’m going to uses the “Strained Peas” recipe I did a few months ago.

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