SC - Re: Welcome to sca-cooks

[Philip & Susan Troy]

ChannonM at aol.com wrote:
> 
> "Maino de Maineri's early 14th century Opusculum de Saporibus, roughly,
> Little Book of Condiments,a sauce book in Latin,"
> 
> Any chances of getting ahold of that one, for us liguistically challenged
> folk, in English?
> 
> Hauviette

Speculum, Volume 9, Issue 2 (April, 1934), pp. 183-190

"A Mediaeval Sauce-Book", by Lynn Thorndike

Thorndike gives a brief precis or summary of the text in English, but
doesn't really translate the recipes word-for-word. Those are pretty
simple, though, because they are largely ingredients lists and fairly
simple to tackle with a dictionary even if you can't deal with the
grammar. The entire article is seven pages long, of which three are the
Latin text and one an excerpt from Villanova's Regimen Sanitatis for
comparison, the remaining three being Thorndike's commentaries and
footnotes. This was, of course, written for scholars in 1934, when it
was pretty much assumed that anyone studying Latin texts would simply go
ahead and learn Latin, so the commentary isn't completely geared for
those with no exposure to Latin at all. You can get a pretty good idea
of what the text says without much translation, though. The Latin is
also a medieval Milanese variant, not classical, so that Cassell's
dictionary won't be entirely helpful at times. 

I got this through the JSTOR database which actually has the issues of
Speculum and a bazillion other journals online, but you have to be a
subscriber. I was afraid to ask what's involved to subscribe as an individual.

The site is http://www.jstor.org/

They also give a list of subscribing libraries; you could look and see
if there's a subscribing library close to you, and go and have the
librarian hook you up. In my case it was for the cost of $.20/printed
page, and all the ogling you want for free.

Another such subscribable database is ABC-CLIO, which seems to provide
abstracts of published articles, including ones from Smithsonian. I
don't _think_ you can get to the actual articles online via CLIO, though.

The maddening thing is that both these database systems, and others as
well, are accessible from a regular home dial-up internet connection,
but you can only get to the useful stuff by subscribing to the system,
and while a major university can afford one or several such
subscriptions, I probably can't. 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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