SC - Written recipes (was: interesting URL - food shopping!)
david friedman
ddfr at best.com
Fri Sep 1 16:59:29 PDT 2000
At 6:24 PM -0400 8/30/00, Jenne Heise quoted someone:
> > I don't know how true it is that professional cooks outside of towns
>> were guild members, but certainly cooks worked with other cooks and
>> learned from them, and there's at least the theoretical possibility that
>> a specific technique could be passed from one generation of cooks to
>> another, just as parents pass recipes to children. Of course, there's no
>> guarantee quantities have never been forgotten, changed or tweaked over
>> the generations, either, especially when different numbers of people
>> were being served each time.
and then said:
>And of course we get into the question of whether this applies to written
>recipes-- if you had learned the recipe from someone else in your guild
>training, why would you be looking it up in a written copy?
Chiquart was chief cook to the duke of Savoy and dictated a cookbook
dated 1420; he says he has never read a cookbook and given how
different his is from all the others, I believe him. He says he is
writing his at the insistance of the duke. So a top professioal cook
did not think of cookbooks as one of the necessary tools of his
trade. I am not sure who used the manuscripts we have.
Elizabeth/Betty Cook
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