[Sca-cooks] My current project and a plea

[Catherine Hartley]

Greetings to the list, from a lurking sometime poster:

My current project for an A&S faire coming up is dealing with the ubiquity
of almonds in period cookery. This has brought up a question that I am
beginning to include in my research and devlopemnt of a database that
indexes cooking sources by cooking techniques, by country/culture, by
timeframe and by ingredients (amng other things).

Now, this databae will take some time to compile. If any one is interested
in helping with this project (in particular the sources I do not have or the
ones not translated), I would love to put an online version together where
people can enter information and I will review it and put up for searching
and downloading.

My purpose in doing this is so we can do all kinds of fun analysis or query
when we have questions like, when did such and such an igredient first
appear in German cooking texts (at least per extant sources) or what have
you. I am also thinking of includig some archaebotanical info on food items
found in privvies or trash pits and their time frames as well. (Can you tell
I work with Archeologists? grin)

I am hoping to see trends as far as cooking techniques and maybe to see when
things disappea,red became more prevalent, that sort of thing. Of course, as
mentioned above, this will not happen over night.

If anyone is interested, you reach me at caitlin_ennis at yahoo dot com or
at this address. I can get an online version of the stuff completed thus far
and data entry forms by the end of  December...

Wishing all well on this chilly night,

Caitlin of Enniskillen