SC - Mediaeval cookbooks to begin with

[Mary Morman]

Elaina takes a deep clensing breath and dares to comment on his grace
cariadoc's opinion:

On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, david friedman wrote:

> Various people are expressing  opinions on how to start. My own view 
> is that it is more fun to start with the primary sources. After you 
> have played with them for a while, and formed your own opinions, you 
> can then look at what other people have to say.
> 
there's certainly a lot of validity in that, and it's the way i started,
and the way many "old" cooks started.

> This is one of the areas where it really is possible for the 
> interested amateur to get right to the coal face, as it were--in 
> contrast to all of the areas where people are used to taking X's 
> description of Y's summary of Z's research as gospel. One advantage 
> of doing it that way is that you won't start out taking other 
> people's guesses as facts.

but if you begin working with such excellent sources as heiatt or redon or
santich you get not only the original text (admittedly sometimes out of
context...) but the value of the decades of work these historians have
done on textual and contextual research.  you don't have to take their
work as "gospel" but it can help to take it as an introduction -
especially with translations.

i think the point here is to distinguish between a -good- secondary source
(knowing the scholarship of the author, one that quotes the original
recipes and comments on their translation, one that puts the original book
or manuscript in context, one that comments on possible interpretations
and presents their own as exactly that - an interpretation, etc.) and a
poor secondary source (one that does not give original recipes just modern
redactions, one that includes extraneous ingredients and leaves out
unfamiliar ingredients, one where the author has not reputation of
scholarship, etc.).

Since this is my opinion, when someone asks me for an introductory book, i
usually recommend heiatt, redon, or santich rather than a facsimile or
reprint of an actual manuscript.  unless you have some knowledge of the
context of what you are reading, it's too easy to get either lost,
frustrated, or, worse, bored!

elaina