SC - Book Review

[Kekilpenny@aol.com]

Hullo, the list, again, with knobs on.

When we last left our intrepid researcher...:

Well, today I picked up the first 35 pages of Liber Cure Cocorum, the
book which couldn't be photocopied because of its great age and extreme
delicacy, but which _could_ be mishandled by ignoramuses prior to being
scanned, except its entirety couldn't be scanned because that would
violate the conditions of the 137-year-old copyright which expired some
62 years ago without being, as far as I can tell, renewed. I did manage
to get approximately half of it scanned, but when I picked up my copies,
the most amazing thing happened!

It turns out that I'm a doofus! Surprised the heck outta me, but, it
seems I Made A Mistake in ordering the copies of pages 1-35 of this
book! I didn't want those at all; they don't have the information I
need! What I actually needed was the information found only in pages
35-61! Boy, am I a jerk! I don't know what I'm gonna do with those other
useless pages, but it seems a shame to waste them when I paid for the
copies. I guess the best thing to do is bind the halves together, and
live with my shame and the burden of imprecise speech.

Still trying to figure out where I've seen these recipes before, in
prose instead of poetry, in the same basic order and under the same
names. Will post again when I know, unless, again, somebody else knows
this one. I know I read somewhere that this is a version of an earlier
manuscript copied in poetry, apparently a 15th-century Northumbrian dialect.

Hey, Ras! You'll be interested in this...there's a reference to drying
herbs to keep over the winter. Apparently you make a pie coffin out of
dough, place your herbs for drying in there, and seal it up, and bake
slowly for a long time; the herbs become dessicated but don't lose their
flavor as they might under bright sun or in an oven, unprotected. You
then take them out and grind them; these people had a different
technology from ours, but they definitely weren't stupid. It's stuff
like this that never ceases to thrill me when I read it: there's
something about solving problems that brings these long-gone cooks, to
me, a sense of vital immediacy. They really are talking to us.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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