SC - Plaintive whine about sourcing....

[Terry Nutter]

Having just responded to Allison (and then read Adamantius saying the same
thing I did rather more succinctly), I am reminded of another tale of similar 
confusion, with the same moral (look at all the surviving manuscripts you can 
find).

If you work from the Pegge edition of Forme of Curye, you will find therein
a recipe for Viande of Cypres that calls for oatmeal.  Taken by itself,
this is one heck of a puzzle.  There are lots of other recipes in other
collections for the same dish, none of which call for oatmeal.  Virtually all
do call for dates, which this one doesn't.

Go to Hieatt and Butler, _Cury on Inglysch_, where this is recipe 100.  
They worked from a bunch of surviving related manuscripts, of which eight
(including one that Constance Hieatt found after publication, and described,
along with a list of errata and additions to CoI, in a separate article).  Of 
the eight, four call for "ootmele" or "mele" or something similar; one
(fairly far removed from the original) calls for damsin plums, and the other
three call for dates.  At the same position.

What the heck happened?

It's impossible to know, but here's a simple conjecture.  At one point in this
collection's history, a scribe was copying a manuscript.  The recipe he was
copying was supposed to say "Take dates"; but the "d" on "dates" had lost
its ascender (either through aging of the MS, or by an error of the previous
scribe), so he found himself looking at "Take oates..."

"Take *oats*?" says our scribe to himself -- not a cook, and knowing just
enough to get future generations into trouble.  "They *can't* mean fodder.
Surely it should be oat*meal*."  And he "corrects".

There is very strong evidence that virtually all period culinary collections
went through the hands of a lot of scribes, most of whom weren't cooks.
Scribal error happens in all sorts of texts.  When a scribe has trouble 
making something out in a culinary text, he is likely to have less knowledge
to guide his choice than with other sorts.  You have to look out for stuff
like this.  It's why pros, given a choice, use as many original sources
as they can.  Sometimes, that's still one, and you're stuck. But where there
are more, it helps.

A couple of other quick ones: there's a recipe in Laud 553 (published in 
Austin, on page 113) titled "Cyuele".  This, by itself, is not particularly
odd.  (The medial "u" represents a "v" in this context, so it's not a
particularly implausible word.)  The problem: there is no other recipe in
the corpus titled anything like that -- but there *are* two surviving
recipes (in Diuersa Cibaria, published in _CoI_, and in an Anglo-Norman 
collection) called "Emeles" -- and they're clearly the same recipe as this one.

What's going on?  Someone who has studied the Laud manuscript directly
tells me that it certainly does say "Cyuele" -- and it's hard to see
how Austin could have misread "m" as "yu".  But look at it from the
other direction: the Emeles recipes are earlier, after all.

In this general time frame, an upper case E is easy to misread as C.
A lower case m is virtually indistinguishable from either in or iu.
A scribe looked as "Em", and saw "Ciu", giving him "Ciueles".  That
being (as he well recognized!) hard to read, he "simplified" 
orthographically by substituting a "y" for the "i".  And voila.
Again, we can't know; but it's far more likely than the assumption
that this dish had two distinct names that are so similar from a
paleographic standpoint and so dissimilar from any other.

Editors can fall into the same trap.  The Society of Antiquaries edition
of Arundel 334 (among many, many errors) provides "Raynecles" as the
title of a recipe.  Raynecles?  Another unique name....

Actually not.  The editors misread it -- partly, I suspect, because
they weren't expecting the actual name, which they associated with
a totally different cuisine, but which is in fact a standard of the
Anglo-Norman repertoire.

I've seen the manuscript.  What it says is "Rayueoles".  The "u" is
again a "v"; what we have here, in a slightly dialecticized spelling,
is ravioles.  And indeed, that's what the recipe describes.

That really is an "e" where the SoA edition has "c"; you can spot
the additional ductus stroke, if you look carefully, though you do have
to study for it.  And "u" and "n" are virtually indistinguishable in
this hand (and most like it).  The mistake was a reasonable one; but
it was a mistake.

So: when you spot something like "mastic" in a cammeline recipe, it
behoves you to be a little cautious.  Even if you're reading right,
and the translator was translating reasonably, and the editor of the
original (whether the same person as the translator or another) 
transcribed it reasonably (and the latter two certainly don't eliminate 
the possibility of introduced error), the scribe who wrote the 
manuscript may well have gotten it wrong.  Determining that he did
is a complex job, usually requiring comparison with a number of
manuscripts (and similar recipes from other collections can shed
light on it).  So one doesn't want to be too quick to assume.  But
it's wise at least to keep it in mind.

But I've rambled more than enough!

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry