[Sca-cooks] A Noble Boke of Cokery of 2007 was Chawettys

Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com
Fri Sep 19 05:09:22 PDT 2008


Ah, how to work with this A Noble Boke of Cokery.
Here are some tips:
First,
Read the extensive forward in the front of the
book where Richard explains about the text and unusual spellings and things
like i for j, v for u, vv  instead of w, etc.

What teh book is?

  Fitch's A Noble Boke of Cokery is a compilation of recipes from
a number of sources.
The  secret or what you aren't being told is that the recipes appear in 
other books or even on the web.
It would have
been nice had A Noble Boke of Cokery actually mentioned someplace
where these recipes came from, but no matter here's your cheat sheet.


The recipes on page 1- 7      are taken from the Pepys manuscript.
You can find it here:
http://godecookery.com/pepys/pepys.htm or in the hardcover book titled
Stere Htt Well which came out in 1972.

Page 8 starts the section taken from Harl. MS 279 which can be found here:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ 
or in the book Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

Page 76 starts recipes taken from Harl. MS 4016 which can be found here
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ 
or in the book Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

Page 125 begins the sauce recipes and those are found in Ashmole MS 1439
Again at:  http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ 
or in the book Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

The last two recipes come from the Laud MS 553
Again at:  http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ 
or in the book Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

The menu sections come also out of Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

What this means is when you can't figure out a word you can turn to 
these sources
and check what the actual printed version from these sources says.
(For those that hate typing, you could of course just copy and print the 
recipes over
from the online versions.) Also make use of the
index in the back of  A Noble Boke of Cokery where the titles are not listed
in the black letter type.

If you get lost, you can of course google the recipe title (or menu 
item) and part of the initial line and locate
versions on the web. Or search the recipes through Doc's every helpful 
medieval cookery
online index. http://www.medievalcookery.com/cgi/booksearch.pl
(Or you could search them through something called the Concordance of 
English Recipes
which is a book that indexes 13th-15th English Recipes. Rather handy if 
I do say so myself ;-) !)
Modern versions of many of these recipes abound. You can again try 
googling the recipe
title, an ingredient or two, and perhaps add SCA and turn up many worked 
out versions
that have been posted online.

It's worth remembering that Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books forms 
the basis
for Cindy Renfrow's  now classic two volume set Take A Thousand Eggs or 
More. If you don't already own that
set, you may want to purchase those 
books.http://www.thousandeggs.com/ttem.html 
Devra has copies. 

Hope this help eliminate the confusion.

Johnnae playing librarian

Cheri or Anne wrote:
> Greetings, I've recently received my copy of A Noble Boke of Cokery from these guys
>  http://tudorcook.blogspot.com/  
> I'm translating one of the recipes for Chawettys and am stumped by two items.  If someone knows, please help.
>  Here is what the line says: ......"verpous, & do hem in a cofyn with olkys of Cyroun, & kutte Datys & Royfonys of Coraunce"......
> 1) what is "olkys of Cyroun" - Oils of ??? 2) Royfonys of Coraunce - regular raisins?
> Thank you, Anne
>  
>  
>  
>
>   




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