[Sca-cooks] Noty or Notye

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

William de Grandfort wrote:
>--- Robin Carroll-Mann <rcmann4 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>  > Not a linguistic flame (not a flame, actually), but a culinary comment.
>  > I would be *very* surprised to see lemon juice in a recipe written in
>  > Middle English.  Even in the Mediterranean corpus, there's very little
>  > use of lemon until late period.
>
>There is a mosaic in Pompeii which depicts a lemon.
>There are lemon-shaped earrings found in the 
>Indus Valley dating back to 2500 BC
>Crusaders returning to Europe from Palestine 
>were said to have carried lemons back with them.
>
>"    The first clear literary evidence of the 
>lemon tree in any language dates from the early
>tenth-century Arabic work by Qustus al-Rumi in 
>his book on farming.3 At the end of the twelfth
>century, Ibn Jamií, the personal physician to 
>the great Muslim leader Saladin, wrote a 
>treatise on
>the lemon, after which it is mentioned with 
>greater frequency in the Mediterranean"
>
>The above citation is from an online article written by Clifford A Wright.
>http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/lemonade.html
>
>I have also heard that the Greeks may well have 
>been cultivating lemons within our early period 
>of
>interest.

There is a big difference between showing that 
lemons were used in England in the period in 
which Middle English was spoken and written and 
showing that lemons existed in other times and 
places...

If you want to show that a certain ingredient was 
used in a particular cuisine, it is more useful 
to demonstrate using recipes or texts from place 
and time. So, have you found lemon juice in an 
actual recipe written in Middle English or 
discussed in texts written in Middle English, as 
opposed to a modern "redaction" or interpretation?

Anahita