[Sca-cooks] Questions about cookbooks for "novice/intermediate"cooks

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Mon Sep 9 17:56:29 PDT 2013


For the novice, I would suggest starting with something like Redon, Sabban, 
& Serventi, "The Medieval Kitchen" which has transcripts, translations and 
worked out recipes.  Or you might try Best's editing of Gervase Markham's 
The English Housewife, where you would need to work out the recipes.  As the 
price and difficulty go up, decide what you want to do before jumping in. 
Yakking with me at the Feast of St. Golias may give you some pointers.

If you want to check out transcriptions of period works, try Thomas 
Gloning's website http://www.uni-giessen.de/gloning/kobu.htm .  If you don't 
have the language skills to translate the texts, check the Florilegium 
www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-MANUSCRIPTS/idxfood-manuscripts.html or David 
Friedman's website http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Medieval.html or 
get a good dictionary of the language, a decent grammar and a pronunciation 
guide so you can try to locate words, phrases and phononyms to produce a 
literal translation.  Hint:  finding the translations is a lot easier.

You might also want to check out the Fons Grewe digital collection which has 
about 50 digitized texts from the cookbook collection he left the University 
of Barcelona.  If the following link doesn't get you the English version of 
the page, one of the buttons in the upper right corner of the page will 
allow you to select the language.  Unfortunately, it won't translate the 
texts.  http://mdc.cbuc.cat/cdm/landingpage/collection/fonsgrewe/lang/en_US

There appear to be some problems with Martha Carlin's webpage or I would add 
it as a pointer to a number of translations.

I'm thinking of donating some pan peppato to the feast this year.  Wanna try 
some?

Bear




> I've been cooking "ethnic" feasts for several years, but am now starting 
> to
> cook more period recipes.  Bear once told me "If you can cook middle
> eastern, you can cook period" As I read through the Florilegium, and
> through posts on here, I see several period authors cited, but I don't 
> know
> what the titles of the books are or if they are in print.
>
> This leads me to a list of questions.  If someone was going to buy 
> "period"
> cookbooks, what would you recommend they buy?   What out of print books
> would you recommend they keep an eye out for?  What period cookbooks are
> available online?
>
> Auria of Golias
> Outlands




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