[Sca-cooks] Anonymous Tuscan Cookbook back online

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

It's great to see it on-line again. More available translated medieval and renaissance cookbooks is always better.

I'd like to remind people (or let those who don't know) that a related cookbook has been on-line for a while, the Anonymous Venetian, of the same time period:
http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/libro.html
Translated by Louise Smithson (SCA: Helewyse de Birkestad) in 2005

A number of cookbooks from the Italian peninsula in this period include dishes of Arabic origin. The three most commonly found are Laymuniyya, Rummaniyya, and Summaqiyya, although there are others.

The Anonymous Tuscan cookbook has all three recipes:
--- Chicken or fowl in sumac sauce [Sommacchia]
--- Chicken in lemon sauce [Limonia]
--- Pomegranate chicken [Romania]
Here instead of almonds there appears to be starch, although this conversion may be a scribal error in the original manuscript or a transcription error, since almonds were commonly used in other recipes in that book.

The Anonymous Venetian includes two of them, using almonds:
--- LIII. Good and perfect hens with sumac [Polastri a Sumacho]
--- CXIX. A lemon flavored dish [Limonia]

And the Anonimo Meridionale/Anonymous Southerner Book A includes two, using almonds:
--- Limonia, transcribed and translated at:
http://www.nicomarin.com/ricette/ric310_e.htm
--- Romania, transcribed and translated at:
http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/birdfruit.html

For additional information, there's an excellent essay on the influences of Arabic recipes on Italian cuisine by Maxime Rodinson, "Romania and other Arabic words in Italian" (trans. Barbara Inskip), in _Medieval Arabic Cookery_, in which he discusses this issue and reproduces a number of related Arabic and Italian recipes.

Urtatim al-Qurtubiyya