[Sca-cooks] Books as gifts

[johnna holloway]

My brief response to this is that I prepare booklists with the 
person/cook/reader in mind, taking into account their specific areas of 
interest. It helps to be a librarian; this is something that we grew up 
doing or so it seems. If the person wants late period sixteenth century 
English only, then recommending the work in Italian on the 14th century 
is not perhaps the best use of time or resources. Likewise someone may 
want to concentrate only on Mid-Eastern or Spanish or Nordic. If they 
want general medieval cookery suitable for novices, that's one list. For 
more advanced students or cooks, reference sources and facsimile volumes 
with little or no commentary may be the volumes to recommend. It's a 
question of interests and level of abilities and the size of the 
pocketbook. Volumes can range in cost from a few bucks for a used copy 
to several hundred for rarer editions. Collections can range in size 
from one to two volumes to some like mine where the working collection 
alone that is out and available is well over a thousand volumes and the 
total collection is over 10,000 volumes.

So the question comes back to the reader? What area are you most 
interested in and how much do you want to spend? You can contact me 
off-list for suggestions.

I'll have a new version of The Book in Hand (Book Collection in the SCA) 
ready within the month. Also a new listing for Mediaevalist Favorites 
Through the Years which will look at the growth and titles of historical 
cookbooks over the past 50 years. Both sessions will be given at RUM on 
November 22 http://www.midrealm.org/rum/fall38/history.html

Johnnae llyn Lewis

---------------------
Leah A. Montgomery wrote:

> If you were to give someone with little to no knowledge on medieval 
> cooking a book to help them out, what would you give them?
> 
> (Just a kind of sneaky way to get a good book buying list going for 
> myself.)
> 
> Leah A. Montgomery