[Sca-cooks] For review: Liber Cure Cocorum and Recipe Spreadsheet

[David Tallan]

Hello all,

A couple of things to offer for public use and comment:

Back in the mid-90s, I had been working on an HTML version of the
Liber Cure Cocorum. Since I had access to a copy and it seemed that
not many did, and since it appeared to be well in the public domain,
I thought I'd mark it up and post it to the Web. It was almost
complete (I had all of the text done and was working on linking the
page numbers in the Glossary with the uses of the terms in the text)
when I set everything aside for 7 or eight years as life pulled me
away from medieval culinary research.

Of course, now when I pick it up again, there are already several
versions on the Web, so the utility is much less. For those who are
interested in seeing it (minus the page references in the glossary,
which (a) are often incorrect and (b) seem much less needed now that
we have browsers with a "find" feature) you can check it out at
http://members.rogers.com/dtallan8500/cooking/lcc20030330.html

More recently I've been working on a spreadsheet of medieval recipes
(later, perhaps, to be made into a database).

I know that others are working on databases of medieval recipes, but
to the best of my knowledge, they are not available on the Web and
are thus unavailable to me and the general body of medieval culinary
researchers. Mine is.

Before I post the URL, a few notes on scope and level of completion:
1) My primary interest is in the cookery of the Western Europe pre-
1500. I thus have not included Arabic or post-1500 recipe collections.

2) Unfortunately, I am currently limited to English in my linguistic
abilities. Thus, I have only included recipe collections which exist
in some version of English or translation thereto. For editions with
translations, page references are to the translated recipes.

3) While I hope and believe that this is useful at its current level
of completion, it is certainly by no means complete. I am attempting
to learn from my previous experience and not wait until it is perfect
before sharing it. Some examples of work that I still have to do
include:

a) Several columns are empty and will be filled in, another is only
partially filled (English collections) and the other rows will be
filled in.

b) I own several alternate editions/translations which I mean to
eventually add to the worksheet.

c) I am also, in parallel, working on a spreadsheet for recipe
redactions which will eventually be merged.

d) I may eventually take the separate worksheet tables and connect
them as tables in a database. On the one hand, it will give much
greater flexibility and querying power (although it is amazing what
you can do with custom filters and sorting in Excel). On the other
hand, not everyone has database software, while Excel is fairly
widespread.

Note on the Keyword Column. This column is a first attempt to enable
the bringing together or related recipe titles regardless of spelling
and to consider a morphemic analysis (e.g., are there commonalities
among all of the "Lombard" recipes?).

This is very much a work in progress and I welcome any and all
corrections and suggestions. If anyone wants to add recipe
collections out of my chosen scope and is willing to do the data
entry, I'm certainly willing to add the rows to the spreadsheet to
make an even more comprehensive tool. New versions will be posted as
work continues. If there is interest, I'll post notices here when I
update the spreadsheet on the Web.

All that said, you can see the spreadsheet at:

http://members.rogers.com/dtallan8500/cooking/ar20030401.xls

Respectfully,
David Tallan