SC - In Grewe's own words, The German Connection, was: Danish recipes, etc.

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the list!

After all the commentary, questions, and _talking around_ Rudolf Grewe's
work on this early XIII century Somewhere-In-Northern-European cookbook
presenting reputed Somewhere-in-Southern-European recipes, I thought I'd
check Grewe's own article(s) on the piece. In particular I was
interested in determining why he seems to feel the recipes were
originally written in German. After examining what he says, though, I'm
still not completely certain I buy the explanations given. The evidence
he supplies doesn't seem to me to be in conclusive support of his claim.
Either I'm misunderstanding something he's saying, or there's more
evidence I'm not seeing, but he appears to me to be adding two and two
to get five.

Anyway, though, here's Part One of Dr. Rudolf Grewe's "An Early XIII
Century Northern-European Cookbook", sans an introduction saying,
essentially, that the paper is in three parts:

> FIRST PART: TEXTUAL QUESTIONS.
> 
> The original text of the cookbook or recipe collection seems to be lost, and the original language in which it was written, and its place of origin, is a matter of conjecture that I will discuss later once the evidence available has been described. The extant versions of the cookbook have been preserved in four codices and I will start by discussing these in order of publication.
> 
> CODEX K. (COPENHAGEN)
> 
> This codex is in the Royal Library of Copenhagen (Ny samling, nr. 66, 8vo). Physically it is of small dimensions, a fact that it is important to keep in mind. It has 147 parchment folios of 11.7 x 9 cm. It may be dated c. 1300 and except for a few pages extraneous to the text it appears to be written by the same hand, in a very legible script typical of the XIII or XIV centuries.
> 
> This codex contains 3 works in Danish; an herbal (110 folios), a lapidary (24 folios) and our cookbook (7 folios), and it was first published by Molbech in 1826 as works of Henrik Harpestraeng, and more recently by Marius Kristensen. (See bibliography)
> 
> Kristensen and other scholars have identified Henrik Harpestraeng with Magister Henricus Dacus. He studied and practiced medicine in Orleans, France in 1181 and became physician to the Danish king, and died in 1244. It is worth mentioning that the herbal attributed to him has for sources Macer Floridus and Constantius Africanus, both of the School of Salerno (XI and XII centuries).
> 
> The cookbook cannot be attributed to him, as it will be made clear, but he could have translated it into Danish. If so, an early XIII century date for the original woud be obvious. This version has 25 recipes and has the peculiarity that each recipe has  aLatin title.
> 
> CODEX Q. (COPENHAGEN)
> 
> This codex is also in the Royal Library of Copenhagen (Ny samling Nr. 7OR, 8 vo.) and consists at present of only 5 small folios (13 x 11 cm.). It is dated as XIV century. It contains only our cookbook written in Danish, except for some extraneous material in folio 1 recto.
> 
> Molbech discovered it after having published the previous codex and realized the similarity to the previous cookbook and published it in 1844. A more modern edition has been made by Kristensen, as part of the works of Harpestraeng. This version contains 31 recipes and has no Latin titles. Comparing it with K it becomes clear that Q is independent of K; that is, they are different translations of an original that has probably been lost.
> 
> CODEX D. (DUBLIN)
> 
> This codex is at present in Dublin (Royal Irish Academy 23 D 43). It is a small octavo of 74 folios and is dated last quarter of the XV century. The contents are much older, however, and consist of several medical works, including the three of Codex K, attributed to Harpestraeng. All are written in Icelandic.
> 
> This codex was published by Henning Larsen in 1931. Larsen shows that this Icelandic version of our cookbook stems from version K, but through a Norwegian intermediary. In the process, it has lost 3 recipes and added one at the end on vinegar, traceable to a different source. It preserves the Latin titles of the recipes.
> 
> DIACHRONIC CHANGES IN RECIPE COLLECTIONS: SKIPPING AND JUXTAPOSITION
> 
> Obviously some changes occur to the text when it is successively copied by hand. When the text is a recipe collection in medieval times, two changes stand out: skipping and juxtaposition. Both are illustrated in our case and many other examples can be given.
> 
> (a) Skipping. A copyist occasionally skips a recipe. Several reasons can be suggested for this behavior, which I will not discuss here. The net result is that the copy is shorter, but preserves the ordering of the original.
> 
> (b) Juxtaposition. New material is generally added at the end. In the case of two recipe collections, this amounts to juxtaposition. There is usually no reordering or reorganization of the recipes.
> 
> In other words, a recipe collection in Medieval times usually decreases its size by skipping and increases its size by juxtaposition. Note that in these processes the ordering of the recipes in the original is preserved in the copies.
> 
> CODEX W. (WOLFENBUETTEL)
> 
> There has been the suspicion that Versions K and Q of our cookbook have a German source, due to the presence of some German words in them. But no trace of it has been thought to exist. I have found a version of our cookbook embedded in a XV century Low German cookbook. This version has suffered from skipping, being removed from the original by perhaps 200 years.
> 
> The codex that contains this cookbook is in the Herzog August Bibliotek of Wolfenbuettel, Germany (Helmst. 1213). It is dated as XV century and the folios are of small size 14 x 10.5 cm. A detailed description of this codex has been given by Otto von Heinemann. The cookbook was published by Hans Wiswe in 1956.
> 
> The fragment that contains our cookbook spans recipes 56 through 71 in the numbering of Wiswe. The correspondence of the recipes with the other versions is given in Table 1.
> 
> Recipes 59 and 71 of this text are nonsensical and the Danish versions clarify what has happened. Recipe 59 corresponds to the beginning of recipe K6. Recipe 71 has an initial fragment that is extraneous to our text and it is followed by the end of recipe K6 and by recipes K7 and K12. A rearrangement of the pagination explains how this mixup could have occurred and it is given in Table 2. The number of folios shown in Table 2 is of course speculative but likely to be close to the correct number, if the size of the pages is small, as they are in all our codices. Such size allows for 3 or 4 recipes per page.
> 
> SOME CONCLUSIONS.
> 
> From the discussion so far we can draw some conclusions:
> 
> (i) Harpestraeng (+1244) is not the author of the cookbook, but may have translated it into Danish or may have owned a copy since it is associated with his works.
> 
> (ii) The original text or urtext was written most likely in Middle Low German.
> 
> (iii) Codex K is probably the oldest of our codices. Since the Codex K is of c. 1300 and contains a translation of the urtext, the urtext must be earlier than c. 1300. Conclusion (i) above suggests an early XIII century date, which is corroborated bythe condition of our cookbook in Codex W. The analysis of its contents, which follows, alos points to an early XIII date, and even earlier.
> 
> (iv) The urtext contained probably 35 to 40 recipes, since versions K and Q are independent translations of it and are of familiar length. The mispagination of W seems to have occurred at the end of the cookbook, which suggests that the book ended around recipe number 35, in our numbering. Note also that the sequence of the four surviving versions meshes in, which suggest that this order was the original one.
> 



In the somewhat forlorn hope this has clarified something (but not sure
what!) for somebody (not sure who!),
 
Adamantius    
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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