SC - Mediaeval cookbooks to begin with
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Thu Mar 23 09:08:39 PST 2000
At 10:17 AM -0500 3/23/00, Angie Malone wrote:
>I think we are going into a one size fits all discussion and don't even
>realize it.
...
>For me, I have a very basic knowledge of any sort of history, especially
>medieval history, and as far as being able to tell old English writing from
>middle english writing(is that the right term?) I am even more clueless.
You don't have to be able to tell old english (Anglo-Saxon, which we
don't have any cookbooks in, unfortunately) from middle english. You
just have to be able to look at a middle english recipe, forget
everything you know about spelling, and read it. Mostly it is just a
matter of sounding out the words--because the idea of standardized
spelling hadn't been invented yet. Occasionally there is a word you
don't know, because it has dropped out of modern English--but both
Curye on Englysche and _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_, which
are the most readily available sources for the English 14th-15th
century recipies, have extensive glossaries in the back.
And, of course, if you are working from someone else's translation of
a period cookbook, it is in modern English.
>The third feast I want to take recipes, all from the same source, redact
>them, etc. so I have now went to the primary sources which I am thankful
>for here at Cornell University.
Not only do you have access to the usual primary sources, you have
some of the original books--books actually printed in period.
Cornell's Hotel Management School library has two sixteenth century
German cookbooks.
>If I would've started my cooking adventure by someone handing me primary
>sources saying go figure these out and cook, I never would've done my first
>feast.
How about someone handing you the primary sources and offering to
help you make sense of them? That is what we have been doing for many
years, and it seems to work fine. Some of the people at our
workshops, as my lady wife says, have to be taught how to boil an
egg. The biggest problem, in our experience, is persuading people
that medieval cooks really knew more about medieval cooking than
modern people, so you should believe the recipe instead of rewriting
it to your own taste.
And I can think of at least one lady in Mirkfaellinn who has both the
ability and the good will to answer a beginner's questions on how to
interpret medieval cooking. Two if the beginner is tactful.
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
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