[Sca-cooks] Book - The Medieval Kitchen

[Alex Clark]

At 10:06 PM 10/17/2003 -0400, Elewyiss wrote:
>Can I interperate this to mean you do not like Fabulous Feasts? Is there
>a problem with the text?

My recollection (from some years ago) is that there are problems with 
almost every recipe in _Fabulous Feasts_. Most of the recipes in this book 
are not attributed to any period source, and many of them look like heavily 
modified adaptations of period recipes, or substitutions, or outright new 
inventions. Though of course it's hard to prove this when you aren't told 
where these recipes are supposed to have come from.

The only recipe that I remember as coming from a specific, identified, 
period source is mammenye bastarde. The quoted recipe seems to have many 
serious errors; in particular, several of the spices are said to be one 
pound each. By comparison with the other recipes from _Two 
Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books_ (Cariadoc's reprint, 1988) it seems very 
likely that the spice measurements were scribal errors, and that where the 
_Fabulous Feasts_ recipe calls for almonds the original called for amydon. 
If this is indeed (as I think I remember) the only recipe in FF to provide 
its source, then for interpretations of cited/quoted period recipes FF 
scores 0 out of 1.

More generally, it seems to include more non-period (or at best 
implausible) recipes than almost any other book on period cooking that I've 
read, with the possible exception of _How to Cook Forsoothly_.

Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon