[Sca-cooks] Units of measure question - Italian, 15th c.

[Daniel Myers]

Thanks!   I'm going to have to make a proper list of these somewhere.


On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 08:42 AM, Louise Smithson wrote:

> Howdy,
>
> A friend of mine is transcribing & annotating dye
> recipes from the
> Segreti per Colori (15th c. manuscript), and has come
> across 5 italian
> renaissance liquid measures that she'd not seen before
> (me either).
> Can anyone here identify these and provide reasonable
> modern
> equivalents.  As a guess, I'd translate "bocale" as
> mouthful and
> petitto as "little bit", but I know pretty much squat
> about Italian -
> modern or otherwise.
>
>> A bocale "4 bocali of water"
>> A foglietta "one foglietta of vinegar"
>> A petitto "and 24 petitti of water"
>> A mettadella "with two metadelle of water for each
> ounce of verzino"
>> A fogliecto "add a fogliecto of boiled ley"
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> - Doc
>
> Doc,
> This is what I could come up with from my sources.
> Hope it is helpful, the only one I couldnít pin was
> the petitto.
>
>> From Hroare, Alfred, An Italian Dictionary, Cambridge
> University Press, 1925.
> Boccale ñ pint bottle or jug or contents thereof
> Foglietto/fogliectoñ dim. Half a folio of print
> usually 8 pages.
> Petito ñ small
> Mettadella ñ sixteenth of a bushel, a liquid measure
> mezzetta
> Mezzetta ñ 1) Tuscan liquid measure, half of a
> boccale, or a quarter of a fiasco (flask), about half
> a pint, 2) dry measure about half a litre
>
>> From I tre libre dellíarte del vasaio ñ The three the
> books of the potters art By Cavaliere Cipriano
> Piccolpassa of Castel Durante (1524-1579) In the
> original Italian with Translation and an Introduction
> by Bernard Rackham and Albert Van de Put.  London, The
> Victoria and Albert Museum, 1934.
> Boccali, fogliette ñ jugs, small jugs with spout and
> without
> Folie da tener Olio, Aceto et Aqua ñ Cruets for
> containing oil vinegar and water
>
> These are probably jugs of set sizes.  Picolpasso
> includes ratios for making these, for reference the
> fogliete basse (short) is half the depth of the
> fogliete longhe (long) which is half again of the
> boccali.
>
> Helewyse de Birkestad
>
>
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