SC - Re: Welcome to sca-cooks

[Philip & Susan Troy]

ChannonM at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In terms of researching the Smithsonian, I was told that it can be done
> electronically for a fee at my local public library, a fee I am trying to
> avoid. I want to do the research myself if I can, it's just that I could use
> some help on the title, date or something that might trigger locating it
> other than manually reviewing every table of contents for the past 10 years
> (yuck) I may be reduced to doing that however as I need this thing for next
> weekends RUM.

Do you know what the fee is? I ask because I did some database searches
the other day at the New York Public Library, and what the fee turned
out to be was the purchase of a card for ten bucks that enabled me to
print out the stuff I found. What I found, and printed out, was an
article from Speculum about fourteenth-century London butchering
practices and legal regulations concerning them (another coup for the
opposition to the bad-meat-spice theory!), two, count 'em, two, articles
by Constance Hieatt which included medieval cookery texts, one being the
two thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman cookery texts that are among the
oldest known medieval recipes in Europe, and the other being a
fifteenth-century English recipe collection in an odd dialect (the first
time I've ever seen a recipe that begins with the word, "recipe", which
is, after all, supposed to mean "take", and is apparently the reason
they're called recipes). Oh, and then there's Maino de Maineri's early
14th century Opusculum de Saporibus, roughly, Little Book of Condiments,
a sauce book in Latin, which appears to have been plagiarized by Arnald
de Villanova in his much-more-well-known Regimen Sanitatis.

After that, I put in an Interlibrary Loan request for Liber Cure
Cocorum, and got change back from my ten bucks.

Now, you may not have a similar price structure at your library, but I
thought all that was worth the ten bucks (actually closer to seven). On
the off-chance you are being intimidated by the cost factor which might
prove not to be very high, I strongly suggest you find out what it is
before you allow it to put you off. If it's a moral issue (Hi, Ras!),
then I guess there's a problem...

As for finding an article in back issues of Smithsonian, as Mistress
Huette pointed out, any good library with a section on periodicals
should have it, either physically or on microfilm, and it should be
accessible (i.e. findable) through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature.

Books are our friends! (I've always wanted to say that!) 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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