SC - Researching bread coffyns

[Decker, Terry D.]

On Mon, 4 May 1998 00:37:13 -0700, david friedman wrote:

>At 5:55 AM +0000 5/4/98, Kornelis Sietsma wrote:

>>The final dish for the evening was a special of our college, and may not be
>>popular with all - it was Chocolate and Pear Tart.  The recipe comes from a
>>manuscript dated 1615, that a past member of our college found in the
>>archives in Milan while researching her PhD.
>
>How sure are you that that account is true? I (and others) tried to follow
>up on the story that someone in Australia had found early chocolate recipes
>in Italy a few years back, and so far as I could tell it was based on a
>published Italian secondary source (_Cucina Fiorentina fra Medioevo e
>Rinascimento_ by Clotilde Vesco, 1984) which did not seem to be
>reliable--at least, unless I misunderstood it, it was dating a chocolate
>recipe to the 15th century! It looked to me as though the sources were
>undated manuscripts, and the modern Italian author was either misdating
>them or mistranslating something else as chocolate.

I will try to track down the details if possible.  I know the lady who did
this research quite well, and I am sure at least that she went to Mantua
and claimed to have found such documentation :)  Unfortunately she has not
been involved in the society for a while, at least in part because she has
been writing up her PhD.

>What sort of evidence beyond word of mouth do you have? In particular, have
>you seen a photocopy of the manuscript?

Alas, I haven't seen proper documentation - but I'm working on it :)  The
source that was listed with the tarts was :
- ---------
Torta Moscardini
Taken from "Cucina Mantovana del principe e popolo" (1989) R. Quazza (?)
and
Archivio di Stato, Milan
a Mantuan cookbook of 1615.
- ---------

>Other than that, it sounds like a fine feast.

Thank you!

- -Korny
- -- 
William Bekwith MKA Kornelis Sietsma | http://zikzak.net/~korny
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