[Sca-cooks] *Experiment*

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jun 16, 2005, at 1:05 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> Vladimir asked:
>
>> How did that [cuskynoles] debate ever turn out anyway?
>>
>
> Inconclusive. For a "Reader's Digest" version of the discussion,  
> see this file in the FOOD section of the Florilegium:
> cuskynoles-msg    (44K)  8/21/00    A medieval fruit-filled pasta  
> dish.

FWIW, I believe the last word on the subject was, essentially, "Well,  
maybe we can't be sure after all..." which is pretty much what I had  
been pushing for (and opting for a simpler but functional  approach  
because of that). Specifically, this was in light of some questions  
that had been raised about the faithfulness/integrity/accuracy of the  
decision of the English scribe for the recipe we'd been looking at to  
associate that particular illustration with that recipe... <takes  
deep breath for further run-on sentence-spouting>... BECAUSE...  we'd  
found an earlier recipe in a French-language source that A) provided  
a somewhat different illustration, and B) provided another and more  
or less unrelated recipe (cressee) which also came with an  
illustration which looked a lot like the one that Hieatt and Butler  
included with their edition of the English version of the cuskynole  
recipe.

What we were left with was a need to look at the original  
manuscripts, since in both cases there appeared to be both some kind  
of scribal transposition shift of the illustration, and some question  
of the accuracy of Hieatt's rendering of the illustrations for both  
the English and French versions of the recipes -- the French edition  
in Speculum is hand-drawn and the English one in Curye On Inglysch is  
rendered more or less in some kind of ASCII, and this is all  
complicated by the fact that the recipe for cressee, the only _other_  
known English early medieval recipe that comes with a diagram which,  
BTW, somewhat resembles the cuskynole illustration, and which appears  
to be mysteriously absent from the English rendering of the earlier  
French source.

In a nutshell, the conclusion as I understand it is (heavy  
paraphrasing):

C.: This is the only, or one of the only, medieval recipes that comes  
with a diagram, so why not be faithful to the diagram?

A.: I'm not that far off the diagram, and even if I am, how much  
stock can we place in the illustration when it seems quite possible  
the illustration was switched at birth for its Evil Twin by a no- 
account English scribe in the early-to-mid 14th century? And a clumsy  
attempt to conceal this crime was made?

C.: <shrug> Who the h**l knows? Let's get a drink and go back to the  
original manuscripts.

Which is where we left it, as I recall. Perhaps His Grace recalls it  
differently, but yes, I agree, it was "inconclusive". But don't  
worry, I was still His Grace's rhetorical and forensic bi-atch.

Adamantius


"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04