[Sca-cooks] Advice on a Book

[Volker Bach]

--- Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius <adamantius1 at verizon.net> schrieb am Mi, 12.8.2009:

> Von: Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
> Betreff: Re: [Sca-cooks] Advice on a Book
> An: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
> Datum: Mittwoch, 12. August 2009, 20:37
> 
> On Aug 12, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Mariann Eaves wrote:
> 
> > I was perusing Potboiler Press (which btw is finally
> up and going, Yay
> > http://tranq3.tranquility.net/~potboilerpress/ ) and
> found Andrew Dalby,
> > Flavors of Byzantium listed.  Is this a good book
> to start out with in
> > learning to cook foods from the Bysantium period?
> 
> My recollection (and I hope I'm not doing Dalby an
> injustice here) is that it's not really much of a cookbook,
> but more of an examination of food references in the fairly
> standard body of available texts: poetry, shipping records,
> histories, etc.
> 
> There may be recipes from sources such as Anthimus and
> Apicius to back up the references, but if there at all,
> they're probably sort of incidental.
> 
> If you simply want to learn what these people ate, it's a
> good source, but if you want one-stop shopping with
> worked-out recipes in the back, such as you might get from
> somebody like Terence Scully, this isn;t really that kind of
> thing.
> 
> Again, this is my recollection, backed up only slightly by
> a very brief skim through the pages before writing this. I
> may have missed the Secret Section On 101 Things To Do With
> Garum... ;-)

It's a fair representation as far as I'm concerned. Flavours of Byzantium is one of my favourite books, but it does not offer much by way of recipes. There are, however, lots of interesting references and a few actual period recipe texts. And it is very much worth having for the information value. Though I still want a Geoponica.

Cheers

Giano