[Sca-cooks] Books

[Stefan li Rous]

  Brandon Withey asked:
> I've been lookin', and tumblin', and just general searching.  And I
> have to
> ask, how do you all FIND these books?  Or any mention of their
> existance?
> The translated Book of Good Food I was kindly supplied the link to.
> But the
> rest of these sound like the Historical Chefs Holy Grail, frequently
> mentioned but rarely seen.

Frequently these books are listed here on the SCA-Cooks list. When I 
see new comments about specific books or even more, comments about 
books I don't think I've seen mentioned before, I save those comments 
into the cookbooks-msg files in the Florilegium. Unfortunately, those 
are somewhat scrambled. Ideally when I have time I will collect those 
comments on a specific book or even better, multiple translations of a 
period text and create a file reviewing a specific book such as:
cb-rv-Apicius-msg (46K)  1/23/05    Reviews of cookbooks having Apicius 
recipes.
cb-rv-Platina-msg (27K)  1/30/05    Reviews of cookbooks having Platina 
recipes.

If you know the author or the name of a specific book, either a 
medieval or modern one, using the search engine on the top page of the 
Florilegium can point you to multiple files with mentions or reviews 
about that book.

I might also recommend this file. This file doesn't talk about books of 
recipes, but rather about books talking about food and feasts in 
general, in the Middle Ages:
books-food-msg   (149K)  1/24/05    Books about food. Not cookbooks.

I don't know what your abilities and past experience with medieval 
cooking is. This will affect which books you will find the most useful 
at this time. Do you want the original text in whatever foreign 
language it might be in? Do you want just the translation of a period 
text? Or do you want to see the authors modern recipe derived from the 
period one?

As others have mentioned there are several bibliographies, some of them 
annotated with review comments, in the Florilegium.

The above files can be found in the FOOD-BOOKS section of the 
Florilegium.

Thanks to the generosity of several translators, most of whom I think 
are still on this list, you can also find several translations of 
period books in the FOOD-MANUSCRIPTS section of the Florilegium.
About-Cheese-art  (12K)  3/ 4/05    "About Cheese" A tranlation by 
Aelianora de
                                        Wintringham of a 1556 letter on 
Swiss
                                        cheese and dairy products.
Guisados1-art    (220K)  5/28/01    A translation of Ruperto de Nola's
                                        1529 "Libre del Coch", part 1 of 
2
                                        by Lady Brighid ni Chiarain.
Guisados2-art    (116K)  5/28/01    "Libre del Coch". part 2 of 2.
                                        Lenten recipes.
Romanian-ckbk-art (112K)  1/25/04    "A Translation of a 17th Century 
Romanian
                                        Cookbook" by Lord Petru cel 
paros Voda.

As others have mentioned there are also copies of other manuscripts and 
translations online and more and more are becoming available as time 
goes on. You can find some info on these in this file in the FOOD-BOOKS 
section:
online-ckbks-msg  (41K)  8/20/02    Online versions of period cookbooks.

For sources for modern books on medieval cooking, you might also check 
these files:
merch-cookbks-msg  (9K)  1/24/05    Merchants selling period cookbooks.
cookbooks-SCA-msg (33K)  7/ 4/04    Cookbooks written by people in the 
SCA.

Master Cariadoc, for instance, has a two volume set of period cooking 
manuscripts at a very good price. They have been reduced to four pages 
on a modern page and the photocopying isn't always the greatest, so 
they can sometimes be difficult to read, but they are well worth the 
price ($7 each?) and I highly recommend them. About two? inches of 8 
1/2 x 11 inch loose-leaf pages.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas on where to locate some of the 
books you are looking for.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****