[Sca-cooks] Lemonwhyt?

[johnna holloway]

I went back and reread Cosman.
 She states:
"All recipes are derived from original medieval
manuscripts or early printed sources. Most are
fifteenth-century. Occasionally a medieval recipe
is said to be "traditional" in the year 1477, thus
truly dating back to the twelfth century or earlier."
page 130. She adds no commentary to the Lemonwhyt recipe.

In checking OED, it seems that the word lemon was then
generally given as lymon. Lemonwhyt is not a term that
appears in either the OED or MED.  "whyt" appears as:
whyt, obs. f. quick a., whit, white, wight, with.

In as much as no one has yet found a source recipe
that combines equal measures of raw rice and PEAS
with ground almonds, currants, lemon and honey,
I really question where the original recipe came from
in terms of a source work or manuscript.
Robert May's recipes didn't combine those
ingredients.

(And since Lemonwhyt is widely posted on the web as a
medieval recipe suitable for medieval feasts, questions
regarding it are going to continue to haunt us
well into the future.)

Johnnae llyn Lewis  Johnna Holloway


> On 22 Feb 2002, at 10:16, Pixel, Goddess and Queen wrote:>
> > Ok, so it's very late, if not totally post-period. Like I said,
> > not-so-expert. I don't really go past the 14th century as far as
> > culinary things are concerned, so I haven't acquired any of the later
> > sources, let alone read them. But it's still not Anglo-Norman, which
> > was the original question. :-)> >
> > Margaret the Anglo-Norman
--------------
Robin Carroll-Mann wrote:
> > Which means -- at best! -- that Cosman took a redaction of an
> early-17th century recipe and stuck it in a collection that she said
> was taken from 14th-15th century manuscripts.>
> As most folks here know, I have no objection to late-period recipes.
>  I do a lot of work with late-period sources, but I don't claim that
> they're a century or two older than they really are.>
> Brighid ni Chiarain *** mka Robin Carroll-Mann