SC - Fish (was Per head budgets)

[Sue Clemenger]

The National Library of France offers, among other works, digital images
of old books on cookery, medicine and wine (in the original languages).
They are delivered either in TIFF or PDF format (therefore, the files
are NOT small). So far, I printed out a 1490 edition of Apicius and a
1518-20 edition of Taillevent (the incomplete one, Vicaire mentions on
p. 825 of his culinary bibliography). In addition they have several
versions of the Regimen sanitatis of Magninus, a 1500 edition of Arnald
of Villanova's Liber de vinis, an early printed edition of Platina, the
Liber canonis of Avicenna, and other works more or less distantly
related to medieval and early modern cookery and nutrition. 

The URL is:

   http://gallica.bnf.fr

To download electronic microfilms of complete works:
1. click option "catalogue"
2. enter your search option (e.g. "Apicius" "regimen sanitatis"...)
3. in the list of results, "Notice" will give you a short bibliographic
information, "Ouvrage" will take you to the electronic book. O.K., let's
click on "ouvrage".
4. To get the whole thing, click on "Déchargement de l'ouvrage" and
chose "La 1ère page" and "Jusque à la fin ..." and chose your favourite
format (TIFF, PDF).
5. After a short while you can download the file either via your browser
or via FTP.

To give you an idea of the file sizes. The 1518-20 Taillevent is about
2.4 MB, the 1490 Apicius is around 2.8 MB, the 400 Pages Magninus is
around 20 MB. However, waiting 10 minutes to download 2 Megs is much
easier than writing a letter to the library, waiting some weeks, getting
and paying for a mikrofilm, putting the microfilm into paper copies, ...

Another way to use this source is searching in the full texts of the
index pages for certain words. If, e.g., you are looking for "oxymel" or
"ossimele", you find two pages of a certain G.B. Zapata ('Li
maravigliosi secreti di medicina ...', 1586) with a recipe for "Ossimele
composto con l'Assaro" ...

Thomas
(yes, there are a few new resources on my own site, too: a new Rumpolt
chapter (stag, venison), the first printed cookbook of Austria (1686),
an early French cookbook (around 1300).
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~gloning/kobu.htm#new (what's new?)
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~gloning/kobu.htm#eltext (etext list) )