SC - Back to the Cookhouse!

[Laura C. Minnick]

Hello everybody!

Remember a couple of months ago when we were discussing having a booth
at Pennsic, and how part of our wanders included the plaint 'but we
can't find info on period food booths!' Well, I found some last night!

_Norman London_ by William FitzStephen, trans. Frank Stenton (full cite
at the end of the post).

pg. 52-

"...Moreover there is in London upon the river's bank, amid the wine
that is sold from ships and wine-cellars, a public cookshop. There
daily, according to the season, you may find viands, dishes roast,
fried, and boiled, fish great and small, the coarser flesh for the poor,
the more delicate for the rich, such as venison and birds both big and
little. If friends, weary with travel, should of a sudden come to any of
the citizens, and it is not thier pleasure to wait fasting till fresh
food is bought and cooked and "till servants bring water for hands and
bread" they hasten to the river bank, and there all things desirable are
ready to their hand. However great the infinitude of knights or
foreigners that enter the city or about to leave it, at whatever hour of
night or day, that the former may not last too long nor the latter
depart without their dinner, they turn aside thither, if it so please
them, and refresh themselves, each after his own manner. Those who
dseire to fare delicately, need not search to find sturgeon or
"Guinea-fowl" or "Ionian francolin", since all the dainties that are
found there are set forth before their eyes. Now this is a public
cookshop, appropriate to a city and pertaining to the art of civic life.
Hence that saying which we read in the _Gorgias_ of Plato, to wit, that
the art of cookery is a counterfeit of medicine and a flattery of the
fourth part of the art of civic life."


Now I want to know what is 'Ionian francolin' and can we cook it in a
Coleman!

'Lainie

Citation:

*CALL #       DA680 .F58 1990.
TITLE        Descriptio nobilissimae civitatis Londoniae. English.
TITLE        Norman London / William Fitz Stephen. Norman London : an
essay / 
               by Sir Frank Stenton ; introduction by F. Donald Logan.
AUTHOR       Fitzstephen, William, d. 1190?
PUBLISHER    New York : Italica Press, 1990.
DESCRIPTION  xv, 109 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
NOTES        Originally published in 1934 as Historical Association
leaflets 
               nos. 93, 94.
NOTES        Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-96) and index.
ALT AUTHOR   Stenton, F. M. (Frank Merry), 1880-1967. Norman London.
SUBJECT      London (England) -- History -- To 1500 -- Sources.
SUBJECT      Great Britain -- History -- Norman period, 1066-1154.
SUBJECT      Normans -- England -- London -- History -- Sources.