Subject: Re: SC - Instinctive cookery

[Sue Clemenger]

And it came to pass on 3 May 00,, that allilyn at juno.com wrote:

> You can begin to trace some things--am just beginning and don't have all
> the sources--from the Catalan, through the Neapolitan Collection to de
> Nola and to Martino, then on to Platina.  Epulario is pretty much a copy
> of Platina.  

It's not just having the sources, but understanding the sources.  My 
Spanish is okay, and I can grope my way through simple Catalan, but I 
have no Italian or Latin.  (Thank goodness Platina is available in English!)

> They all copied each other--I am saying 'sharing' here, not
> our attitudes to plagerism--and find some other similar things that
> Santich translater, and Redon et al translated.  These are all what I
> refer to as the 'Mediterranean corpus'.

I recently skimmed through a bookstore copy of that new book _A 
Mediterranean Feast_ by Clifford Wright.  The recipes are all modern or 
"traditional", but the author goes into in fair amount of history.  He 
mentioned that same point, which is something I've been noticing a lot 
lately.  The cuisines of Italy and Christian Iberia are so intertwined that 
you really have to look at them together.  I'm not quite sure where the 
Islamic cuisine fits into the picture.  Wright quotes the late Rudolf 
Grewe as saying that he believed that further research would indicate a 
larger Islamic influence on Mediterranean cuisine than was previously 
suspected.

As for sharing -- I just discovered recently that Granado was heavily into 
sharing.  Not only does his book contain most of de Nola's recipes, but 
200+ from Scappi (an Italian) as well.

This idea has been around for a while.  There's a essay by Santich in 
_Du manuscrit a la table_ on "Les elements distinctifs de la cuisine 
medievale mediterraneene" ("The distinctive elements of the medieval 
Mediterranean cuisine")  But she was dealing mostly with common 
ingredients and methods of preparation, rather than the borrowing of 
specific recipes.

> Allison,     allilyn at juno.com
 

Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)
mka Robin Carroll-Mann
harper at idt.net