[Sca-cooks] New Hieatt Work

[Johnna Holloway]

The announced new volume
Cocatrice and Lampray Hay: Late Fifteenth-Century Recipes from Corpus  
Christi College Oxford  by Constance Hieatt will be out later in the  
spring. It's not going to press until January 2012.

It will be the first publication of the "Corpus Christi College,  
Oxford MS F 291, which contains 99 recipes written in English (showing  
signs, the experts claim, of East Anglian provenance). The recipes are  
remarkable for their close attention to detail and much greater  
information about quantities of ingredients than similar collections  
from earlier centuries. They include dishes such as the famous  
cocatrice or basilisk, which is a combination of pig and chicken  
constructed as a fabulous beast, to the more mundane, but more  
cookable, blancmanges, stewed oysters, croustades, pies, venison, beef  
and chicken dishes. The edition gives the original text, a translation  
into modern English, a full commentary, and notes for the modern cook  
who wishes to interpret each dish in his or her own kitchen."

Johnnae