[Sca-cooks] New find by Helewyse

[Johnna Holloway]

This is too good not to share so I am going to post this
to Subtleties and SCA Cooks.

It's good to hear that Gallica is working again and seems to be better 
than ever.

Johnnae
> While noodling around on the BNF:Gallica ( http://gallica2.bnf.fr/) 
> site last week, essentially trying to find a specific book for my 
> apprentice I stumbled across a gem.
> Compendio de i secreti rationali di M. Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese, 
> Medico & Cirugico.  - Compenium of rational secrets of M. Leonardo 
> Fioravanti Bolognese, Medic and Surgeon.
> Gallica has three copies published in 1564, 1581 and 1592 which puts 
> it within the SCA period of study.
> While three out of the five books are of not much interest to cooks, 
> dealing with respectively Medicine, Surgery, and alchemy the fourth 
> and fifth are. 
> The fourth book deals with beauty secrets (dyes, face creams, 
> cosmetics and the like) and the fifth with "many other arts and 
> excercises". 
> In the short time I've had this source of the most interesting things 
> I've found are:
> 1) Recipes for making rennet, cheese, ricotta and butter
> 2) A recipe for pan forte/pepato which both me and Basilius have been 
> searching for for a long time without sucess.
> 3) A recipe for flower syrups
> 4) lots of conserving/preserving recipes
> I've worked on the cheese stuff and should have it on my website 
> within the next couple of days and should have the pan forte/pepato 
> recipe done shortly. 
> This just goes to show that one should not limit ones searches to 
> cookbooks alone, there are many different places you can find reicpes 
> and information for cooks.  Apparently I now need to add books by 
> surgeons to my existing list of: gardening books, heath manuals, 
> agricultural guides and cookbooks.
> Helewyse
> ps the new gallica site makes searching much easier than previously, 
> you can search by keywords in the language of your choice and have a 
> good chance of pulling something interesting up.
> Helewyse
> geeked
>
> <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51733/*http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ%20>