SC - Written recipes (was: interesting URL - food shopping!)

[david friedman]

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