[Sca-cooks] A book I'd never heard of...

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, all, and a joyous holiday to you all, whatever it may be for you!

My lady wife and I just received a gift of a book, which is a new one
to me, "fetes gourmandes au moyen age" (for whatever reason, the
English-language tradition of capitalizing titles seems not to
operate, at least not universally, in France). This is from
Jean-Louis Flandrin and Carole Lambert, and it's a an
edition-with-commentary (and really gorgeous photographs of finished
dishes) of medieval recipes from French sources, some in French and
some in Latin.

It's probably in a format about as good as a secondary source can
get: the original recipe, not only in its original language, but in
its original handwriting, transcribed beneath for easier reading.
Accompanied by commentary by the authors/editors, presumably designed
to allow the modern cook to get reasonably close to the method
(anybody remember early editions of Cariadoc's Miscellany?) without
actually providing a traditional modern-interpretation recipe, per
se. And on the bottom of the page, in teeny-tiny print, as if the
idea embarrasses them, modern ingredient quantities.

One perceived drawback for some of us might be that most of the text
is in French, and some of it is in Latin. I haven't yet determined if
the Latin text is translated into French, but frankly I doubt it. I
could be wrong, as I've been slowly stumbling through bits of the
French text (it's kind of fun to have my wife say the giver must have
intended this as a joint gift so she could translate for me, only to
find that my grasp of 14th-century culinary French is actually better
than hers, although I cannot ask the way to the lavatory in modern
French to save my life).

Sources include the Usual Suspects, Taillevent, Chiquart, etc., with
at least one Latin MS I had never seen before, looking vaguely like
(but not) the Opusculum de Saporibus.

Looking forward to getting through about a page a day for quite a while...

Adamantius