[Sca-cooks] Large birds for feasts
Johnna Holloway
johnnae at mac.com
Fri Mar 4 07:37:24 PST 2011
Culinary historians often point to a lag time between a food's
appearance or mention
in letters, diaries, household accounts, menus, even artwork, etc. and
when we start finding recipes in a printed book or a recipe in a
manuscript. It's not just a matter of the turkey. In this case
perhaps no instructions were needed. It was just another large bird
and people ate and enjoyed large birds as a matter of course. What I
found in my research for my paper on the turkey was that the famous
carving rhyme of Boke of Keruynge from 1508 might have mentioned
explicitly “Dysmembre that heron. Dysplaye that crane. Dysfygure that
pecocke. Unjoynt that bytture," the “unjoynt that bytture” changes
later to very detailed instructions for the reader on how “To cut up a
Turkie or Bustard.”
Johnnae
On Mar 4, 2011, at 10:24 AM, Jennifer Carlson wrote:
> I wonder what the time lag is between a food item's introduction and
> it's first recorded recipe. snipped So, you are seeing in
> correspondence and art the better part of a century of turkeys in
> Spain and Italy, but the first recipe appeared when? And for how
> long after their introduction, some time between 1502 and 1522, were
> they novelty items and a luxury food before there were enough birds
> for a wider dissemination? How long before cooks got enough
> experience working with turkeys to figure out the best ways to
> prepare, season, and serve them? Just pondering, Talana
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