SC - interesting URL - food shopping!

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Jenne Heise wrote:
> 
> > I don't know how true it is that professional cooks outside of towns
> > were guild members, but certainly cooks worked with other cooks and
> > learned from them, and there's at least the theoretical possibility that
> > a specific technique could be passed from one generation of cooks to
> > another, just as parents pass recipes to children. Of course, there's no
> > guarantee quantities have never been forgotten, changed or tweaked over
> > the generations, either, especially when different numbers of people
> > were being served each time.
> 
> And of course we get into the question of whether this applies to written
> recipes-- if you had learned the recipe from someone else in your guild
> training, why would you be looking it up in a written copy?

One possibility is that such books were useful for requisitioning
ingredients,  or as a reminder for cooks who might know the basic
techniques, but might not know the difference between frowndoodle and
poopimawfree without a memory jog, and it may also be that books were
passed from one household to another, related one. For example, Chiquart
was the personal cook of the first Duke of Savoy; the Duchess had her
own staff, including cooks, it seems, who may or may not have worked in
the same location at the same time; very probably at least part of the
time in completely different households.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com