SC - Mediaeval cookbooks to begin with

[david friedman]

At 7:36 AM -0700 3/23/00, Mary Morman wrote:

(quoting me)

>  > 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.

and responds

>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.).

Certainly I agree with that point, and one of my reservations is that 
if you point people at secondary sources they may end up with 
_Fabulous Feasts_ or (a much less extreme example) _To the 
King/Queen's Taste_ instead of _Pleyn Delite_.  Indeed, someone on 
this thread did recommend _To the King's Taste_.

But my chief point is that, even if you could get pointed at good 
secondary source, it is more fun and more exciting to start by trying 
to do it yourself, get some feel for both the difficulties and 
uncertainties, and then go to good secondary sources for additional 
information. I think people, in and out of the SCA, are simply too 
much in the habit of relying on second-hand (more often fifth hand) 
information, and that one shouldn't miss the opportunity to actually 
do original scholarship from primary sources first, before you have 
been fed all the answers by someone else.

>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!

I don't see how anyone is likely to get bored with a primary source 
cookbook, provided it is in a language he can read.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/