[Sca-cooks] Books for Cooks, Medieval Cook Books

[Pat]

Thank you so much for this marvelous site.  It is a wonderful resource for us amatuer food researchers.  I appreciate how much time and effort must have gone into creating this.
I think the facsimiles of the Forme of Cury and the Boke of Kokery are great.
I only have a couple of caveats.  One rather large, and one rather minor.  
The large one is the old slur on medieval cooking that a lot of spice was used to cover up the smell and/or taste of rotted food.  Among others, Colin Spencer in "British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History", dispelled this error.  My own modest research shows that no amount of cinnamon is going to cover up the taste of spoiled meat.  Rather, medieval chefs who left written recipes were head cooks for large households, so they used large amounts of spices because they were cooking large amounts of food.  They also used a lot of different spices in one dish, compared to our modern, more spartan recipes.  
The minor error was in the transcript and translation of the "Garbage" recipe from "A Boke of Kokery."  The modern spelling of vergeous is verjuice, and it is sour juice, preferably but not exclusively, sour GRAPE juice.  In the Middle Ages, there was actually a variety of grape grown just to make verjuice.  
 
Sincerely,
Patricia D. Griffin
Montogmery, Alabama, USA