[Sca-cooks] pantler knife/chaffer knife

[Stephen Bloch]

>This is rather interesting.  I've read all of the sources people 
>have given, but I didn't catch all of the variations.  Makes me 
>wonder if these variations are geographic or temporal.

Let me re-state more briefly the question that occurred to me in the 
course of my previous post on the subject:

Is there any known source for the terms "chaffer" or "mensal knife" 
other than Fabulous Feasts and copies therefrom?

If not, then we have two possibilities: those terms appear only in 
some obscure primary source that Cosman read thirty years ago but 
nobody since has checked into, or those terms appear only in Cosman's 
imagination.  We're in the same boat as on a lot of the recipes.  But 
for many of the recipes, there's reason to believe she just made them 
up to illustrate her theme of medieval cooks liking visual illusion 
and spectacle, whereas these two terms are so specific, and don't 
seem to help grind any particular axe, that one thinks they must have 
come from somewhere.  Fortunately, Cosman does give a list of primary 
sources she checked; unfortunately, there are hundreds of them, the 
citations aren't tied to any particular chapter of the book, and many 
of them are (or were) in obscure collections.

-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu