SC - Liber Cure Cocorum

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Alys Katharine scripsit:

> Greetings.  I missed the beginning of this thread, but I have a copy in my house 
> in a book dating from 1864, _Philological Society's Transactions_.  Said book also 
> contains "The Pricke of Conscience",a Northumbrian poem by Richard Rolle, and "Castel 
> Off Loue" (Chasteau d'Amour), an early English translation by Robert Gresseteste, Bishop of 
> London.  Found the book (at Pennsic, IIRC) for $35.  
> 
> What recipe were you looking for?  Also, the introduction to this says that it is
> printed from a "transcript of the Sloan MS 1986, where it occurs as an appendix to the 
> 'Boke of Curtasye'.  It is written in a Northern dialect of the SVth century, probably
> not much earlier than the time of Henry VI."
> 
> Alys Katharine

Well, to be truthful, I'm not looking for any particular recipe. It's
just that it's one of those sources people like Scully and Hieatt are
repeatedly referring to, but which doesn't seem to be, itself, easily
available. I should have the whole thing by Wednesday or so, though. I
still have a vague recollection of reading that it exists elsewhere, in
earlier, prose, manuscript form, and it does look very familar, possibly
somewhat like Mss. Harl. 279 & 4016, but with the recipes in verse, and
a jumbled order. Maybe that just means it's a 15th-century English
cookbook, I dunno.

I originally posted the Amazing Saga of My Search for Liber Cure Cocorum
as a way to show people that this kind of research is actually kinda
fun, and that we aren't limited to everybody else's adapted recipes,
even the good ones. Kind of in support of Cariadoc's repeated assertion
that this stuff is out there, and that we don't have to rely on Amazon
to decide what we can and can't research. It does seem like a lot of us
are doing our research either via online booksellers or some occasonally
dubious web pages.

I originally got on this kick when I talked to a Laurel in the East
who'd been doing a lot of translation of German sources, who felt, more
or less, that an added attraction of the German stuff was that it wasn't
the same old humdrum Anglo-Norman stuff. My feeling was that we in the
SCA tend to actually cook from about a quarter of the recipes and
sources available in the Anglo-Norman corpus; the problem was not with
the material, but with the cooks. I thought it unfair to compare the
German sources, worthy of praise in their own right, by using the
English stuff as the Poor Relation. It is a disservice both to the
German as well as the English material.
   
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================