SC - Norman foodhistory/cookbook

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Christina Nevin wrote:
> 
> Has anyone seen this book? Is it any good?
> 
> Claude Guermont The Norman Table
> U. S. A.: Charles Scribner, 1985 History and recipes of Normandy before and
> after the Norman conquest .

Um, yes, actually. I love mine. It's a _wonderful_ book, written by the
guy who at one time (and perhaps still does) ran a functioning
student-run restaurant on the campus of the Culinary Institute of
America in Hyde Park, New York. However, it should be noted that this is
the Norman cuisine of people who eat lobster and pike sausage with
cream, pork with prunes and brandy, and Tripes a la mode du Caen, washed
down with cider and followed by Calvados drunk out of the empty but
still-warm coffee cup, and not those mean guys who shot good King Harold
in the eye and overtaxed the Saxons and got their bottoms kicked by
Robin Hood and Wildfrid of Ivanhoe.
    
Any history discussed in the book is more likely to be stuff like who
Mere Poulard actually was, and how her mysterious, much-disputed
late-nineteenth-century omelette was actually made, rather than having
anything much to do with, say, the food in the Two Anglo-Norman Cookery
Manuscripts. I'm not aware, thinking back, of any references at all (or
hard data) to the cuisine of medieval Normandy (unless it is an account
of the questionable legend about Tripes a la Mode du Caen, and how the
different ingredients were thrown together after Vikings took everything
else, or the old saw about Charlemagne and the cheese rind). Besides,
I'm a little suspicious of where the tag line "before and after the
Norman conquest" is supposed to be taking us, since the conquest was of
England, not Normandy. It's kind of like saying, "history and recipes of
the USA both before _and after_ the Korean War".    "Yeah... So???"

However, for those whose interest in food and food history doesn't get
switched off in January of 1601, it is a wonderful book.

Adamantius 
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com