[Sca-cooks] Wanted: Italian cookbook that hasn't been translated
Louise Smithson
helewyse at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 10 17:16:14 PST 2010
David Friedman wrote:
My daughter Rebecca was planning, for her winter term project, to
translate the anonymous Tuscan cookbook (Libro della Cucina).
Yesterday I discovered that Vittoria has already done it, so we are
now looking for an alternative. Does anyone on the list know of a
period Italian cookbook that has not yet been translated?
Along related lines ... . I'm familiar with the _Epulario_ that's a
late 16th c. English translation of an Italian cookbook. Recently I
was in the rare books room of the U of Chicago library and discovered
that they have several 16th c. editions of the Italian Epulario--same
subtitle (only in Italian), so pretty clearly the original that was
translated. I've arranged for them to send me a photocopy of the
earliest, I think 1537 or so.
Is anyone familiar with it? It occurred to me that, if nothing else
is available, Rebecca might do a new translation. One every five
hundred years might not be too many.
--
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
In addition to the untranslated works that Johnnae pointed out you may also want to try the recipe section from Pisanelli, Baldasare "Della natura de cibi"
available here online
http://alfama.sim.ucm.es/dioscorides/consulta_libro.asp?ref=X533107074&idioma=0
Plus there is the Manuscritto Lucano (an 16th century cookbook from Southern Italy).
As far as the Epulario, the loss of information between all the translations and retranslations makes it an interesting case to study.
Version 1 - Martino in Italian
Version 2 - Martino recipe translated by Platina into Latin (loss of information 1)
Version 3 - Martinos recipes from Platina translated into Italian from Latin (Loss of information #2)
Version 4 - the 16th century translation (The Italian Banquet) into English from Italian (loss of infromation #3).
I took a class at Pennsic one year that compared a single recipe from Martino through Platina and then showed how it was given in the Italian Banquet, it was quite an interesting loss of information, from specifics about time, measurements and so on.
But as far as untranslated Italian manuscripts go, there are quite a few of them still out there.
Helewyse
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