SC - Confectionery manual
Robin Carroll-Mann
harper at idt.net
Thu Apr 6 22:21:43 PDT 2000
And it came to pass on 6 Apr 00,, that Lee-Gwen Booth wrote:
> >From Gwynydd unto the Gathered Cooks:
> Oh, and could I have some more information about the
> 14th century Confectionery Manual which was mentioned earlier?
I think that was in a post I made. I just got, via ILL, an article which was
listed in the bibliography of _A Drizzle of Honey_ (a recent cookbook
which about the food of secret Jews in medieval Spain). The article
contains the text of a 14th century Catalan confectionery manual.
The manual contains 33 recipes, most of them for fruits and vegetables
preserved in syrup, from ginger to apples to horseradish(!). There's also
a recipe for compost, and a perfume recipe and several candies.
Pinyonat is a kind of pine-nut brittle made with sugar and rosewater,
which I tried unsuccessfully to redact tonight. Hazelnut torron is a
honey-based candy, which is still made in Spain today. And casquetes
are some kind of fried pastry/sweetmeat, made with dough and honey
and spices, and three kinds of nuts.
The text of the manual is in 14th century Catalan, which I can just
puzzle out with the help of dictionaries. Fortunately, the glossary and
the introductory comments by the editor are in modern Spanish. And,
like many period cookbooks, the language is simple and repetitive.
The original manuscript has no listed author. It is bound with several
other cookery manuscripts in a book at the University Library of
Barcelona.
The article is:
Faraudo de Saint-Germain, Luis, "'Libre de totes maneres de confits':
Un tratado manual cuatrocentrista de arte de dulceria", Boletin de la
Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1946, vol. 19, pp. 97-
134.
I really don't need another cookbook to distract me, but I just couldn't
resist...
Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)
mka Robin Carroll-Mann
harper at idt.net
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