[Sca-cooks] "The Medieval Kitchen"

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Fri Nov 7 11:43:49 PST 2008


I'm pretty certain it is still in print in paperback. What went out 
of print was the hard cover edition.

I think "The Medieval Kitchen" is a wonderful book. I would recommend 
it without hesitation to the beginning historical cook and even to 
more experienced cooks for a few reasons.

First, while it has many recipes we can find in other sources, it 
also has recipes nowhere else available in English.

Second, the introductory matter is excellent for the beginning 
historical cook, and even for the intermediate cook who may not have 
looked into all the issues covered.

Third, it mostly focuses on Mediterranean cuisines (well, Paris is 
not in the Mediterranean, but anyway...), and, well, Mediterranean 
cuisines are the best cuisines, other than that Arabic-language 
corpus (ok, ok, this is my personal bias and not objective :-) It was 
the first Medieval cookbook i bought after i joined the SCA.

The modern versions of the recipes are almost uniformly quite tasty, 
if not always 100 per cent "period", but they're good starters for 
beginning historical cooks. I don't use them, however, preferring to 
work from the original recipe.

My biggest frustration with the book is that the recipes in their 
original languages are in the waaaaay back of the book and they're in 
a medieval-oid typeface. That is, my two biggest frustrations with 
the book are...
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah



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