[Sca-cooks] Another question on peas

[wheezul at canby.com]

>>
>> My focus is to prepare to give a class on a 16th century German cookbook
>> Katrine
>
> Which cookbook?  The 16th Century was a time of great change in foodstuffs
> and the availability was skewed depending on wealth and interest.
>
> Bear

Ein Köstlich neu Kochbuch (1598) by Anna Wecker (or Weckerin) - which is
apparently the first printed cookbook with a woman author (the earlier
women's cookbooks are manuscripts).  She was the wife of a physician and
in the court of Pflazgraf of Rheinland - I suspect she was quite learned
and am peripherally interested in identifying her source of knowledge for
her medical advice, but primarily focused on the food and recipes at this
point.  I am only a few months into the project and trying to develop the
specialized vocabulary.  So far the recipe amounts are mostly single dish,
and is written in a type of grandmotherly stream-of-consciousness sort of
way.  So far I have done the table of contents of part 1 and 2, have been
excited about fritters, funnel cakes, proto-baumkuchen and quark.  Current
work is to identify, number and more or less name each recipe.

The baumkuchen queries based on an instruction for "heidenische teig" took
me on a road that led me to read Ryff's section on grains and beans.  And
thus, I want to know more!  I'm trying to sort out in my mind the
different type of grains used in baking for one, along with some of the
words being regionally specific and subject to variant spelling.  In my
head I told myself I needed to go back and get a grounding in the basics
to help this attempt at understanding the nature of the ingredients.  It
has been a great deal of fun.

I've been blogging about it here:

http://jillwheezul.livejournal.com/tag/weckerin
http://jillwheezul.livejournal.com/tag/baumkuchen

Katrine