SC - Re: sources for cheesemaking recipes

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 11:34:24 -0500
> From: tanyaw at world.std.com (Tanya or Lady Emmanuelle)
> Subject: SC - sources
> 
> I am interested in doing research on period cheese making and dairying. 
> Does anyone have reccomendations for period sources about this. I am
> looking for recipies, if possible, but anything would be interesting.
> I have a copy of Menaigier de Paris, what others should I see?
> Thank you!!!
> Emmanuelle of Chenonceaux

For the extremely late / post period types, there are Sir Hugh Plat's
"Delightes for Ladies", Gervase Markham's "The English Housewife", and
Sir Kenelm Digby's "The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme
Digby, Kt., Opened, etc".  Both Plat and Digby are available as part of
H.G. Sir Cariadoc's Collection, and Markham is pretty readily available
in a recent edition from some Canadian university press. Certain
Sinister Influences having thought it a good idea to place an enormous
pile of archive boxes of fabric and patterns in front of my bookshelves,
I can't say in detail. There's also "A dairie Booke for good huswives",
by Bartholomew Dowe, 1588. This was printed in a facsimile edition a
while back, as a sort of appendix to a contemporary English translation
of an Italian book on household management, a while back. Again, I can't
get at the info easily, but Lord Stefan Li Rous may have it; I seem to
recall giving him the publisher's info at one point.

Apart from the occasional chinche or junket type recipe in the
mainstream medieval feast recipe sources, I don't think you'll find
much, at least not in English, from the Middle Ages. I suspect there's a
connection between this fact, the availability of later sources, and the
breakup of the monasteries in England under the Tudors, but it's a bit
too much to go into right now. 

You might also look for the Roman writers Cato the Elder, and Columella,
both of whom wrote big, authoritative books on farm management. I know
Columella's book has some goat cheese recipes, and believe Cato may have
some too. Possibly there might be info in Pliny the Elder's "Historia
Naturalis", but I'm not certain of that. 

In any case, the recipes in the Roman and the Renaissance sources
suggest there wasn't much of a change in the technology employed in the
period in between. 

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
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