[Sca-cooks] Cookbook Geneology

[Johnna Holloway]

Actually a large number of academic texts and papers which examine  
manuscripts and early printed books do in fact talk about the place of  
the manuscript or book being examined within the larger scope of the  
canon and the recipes. Certainly Michael Best's footnotes talked about  
recipes and their sources in his edition of Markham's The English  
Housewife. Karen Hess did commentaries for each of the recipes  
published in the MWBC.

Professors Constance Hieatt and Terence Scully are two authors you  
should look at.  Scully extensively discusses the place and sources of  
La Varenne, Taillevent, Chiquart, and Scappi in his books. The  
Neopolitan Recipe Collection. Cuoco Napoletano work which Scully  
edited is another great example.

Most of the time this material you seem to be seeking is in the  
introductory pages. For 1985's Curye on Inglysch by Hieatt and Butler,  
the pages you should examine are 15-34. Constance Hieatt's latest book  
on medieval English recipes, titled A Gathering of Medieval English  
Recipes also discusses  the relationships between the medieval English  
collections. She publishes a number of them here for the first time  
and discusses the antecedents.

I would be remiss should I not mention that our book from 2006 is all  
about gathering recipes together. The Concordance of English Recipes:  
Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries by Hieatt, the late Terry  
Nutter, and myself  certainly made those connections and provided a  
bibliography to the articles and books for further study. That is what  
a concordance does. If you don't already own a copy of the  
Concordance, Devra has copies in stock.

Hope this helps,

Johnna,
Bibliographer, librarian, and co-author of the Concordance

On Jan 31, 2011, at 3:29 PM, Sam Wallace wrote:

> I know the Medieval Cookery site does a great job comparing individual
> recipes, but has there been anything that links the progression of
> different groups of recipes from one cookbook to the next? I do not
> recall seeing anything of this nature other than a few examples, very
> limited in scope.
>
> Guillaume