SC - Humoral theory

[Valoise Armstrong]

Ras wrote:
>Considering that our time period spans hundreds of years and we only have a
>handful of cookery manuscripts that have survived, the most we can extropolate
>is that the individual who wrote a particular manuscript felt that the humoral
>theory was valid. In our own time there has been dozens of different cookery
>books written that expound dozens of different medical theories. Is there any
>evidence that it was not the same in the MA? The uniqueness of the humoral
>theory would naturally make such maunuscripts immenately  'collectable' but
>would not neccessarily mean it was widely used.

I can't say much about English or French or Italian sources, but there does
seem to some attention paid to humoral theory in German books. I wish more
of this stuff was available in English. I won't say I've found the theory
in every German source I've looked at, but it definitely gets some
attention. I've put the bibliographic stuff at the end.

Meister Eberhard, who was a professioal cook in the 15th century devotes
more space to the humoral qualities of food and how to balance them than he
does to actual recipes. His cookbook is at the back of  a doctoral
dissertation by Anna Feyl and isn't too hard to get through interlibrary
loan.

Kuchenmeysterey also has some information on humors, IIRC it's mostly
medicinal, what to add to wine and so forth to treat various conditions.
That book was something of a 15th and 16th century bestseller in Germany,
and continued to be printed into the 17th century. I found that one through
interlibrary loan.

There was a 1597 cookbook written by Anna Wecker, the widow of a physician,
that's supposed to have a lot about humors, but I haven't seen it myself.

Here's the book info.

Eberhard. _Kochbuch_. c. 15th C. In Anita Feyl, "Das Kochbuch Meister
Eberhards." Ph.D. diss., Albert-Ludwig University, 1963, 82-117.

_Kuchenmeysterey_. Passau: Johann, Petri, c. 1486. Edited by Rolf Ehnert.
		Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1981.

Wecker, Anna. _Ein koestlich new Kochbuch_. Amberg, 1597. Facsimile reprit
with a commentary by J. Arndt. Munich, 1977.

Valoise



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