SC - Grits

[Philip & Susan Troy]

A while ago we talked about the use of text analysis software for
culinary research. Using such software we need:

(1) electronic texts of historical cookbooks,

(2) knowledge about wordforms and their historical spellings or
otherwise some sort of markup in the electronic texts, relating
different spellings to a basic form or relating text passages to any
aspect of culinary practice that one wants to analyze.

E.g., searching for quinces in old German cookbooks, one has to search
for wordforms beginning with "kütt", "kitt", "quit", "ku:et" (u:e = u
with an e above it in my corpus), "kytt", "khyt", "kita" and maybe
others.

One type of search result are concordance lines like this:

    (1350) BvgS 68 2 Wilt du machen ein ku:etenmu:os, so nim
           ku:eten, wie vil du

That means: The source "(1350) BvgS" (Buoch von guoter spise) has at
reference 68.2 (recipe 68 in Hajek's edition, line 2) a passage about
"ku:etenmu:os" (sort of quince dish).

Another type of result is a list of references without text quotations,
e.g. from Sabina Welserin:
kittine (1553) KB SabiWels 15 1
kittine (1553) KB SabiWels 68 1
kittine (1553) KB SabiWels 68 2
kittine (1553) KB SabiWels 68 4
kittintortten (1553) KB SabiWels 107 1
kittine (1553) KB SabiWels 107 2
kittenprott (1553) KB SabiWels 205 1
kittinbastetten (1553) KB SabiWels S24 25
kittintorten (1553) KB SabiWels S25 5

>From this list we may guess that recipe #107 is about a quince tart and
look for that recipe in the text or in Valoise Armstrong's translation
on the web.

Searching a small-but-better-than-nothing-corpus of electronic German
cookbooks, I got 146 hits for quinces from the 14th century 'Buoch von
guoter spise' to the cookbook of Goethe's grandmother (1724).

Good night,
Thomas

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