[Sca-cooks] The Science of Cooking

[Glenn Gorsuch]

You can actually have it for free download if you want.  That was the deal
when I got the donations needed to get it translated.  I just put it
through Lulu because *I* wanted a pretty book to put on my bookshelf, and
one to take to events to cook (surprisingly, printing it through Lulu was
cheaper and easier than through my local copy store).  Any profits made
from the printing of the book is being gifted to the West Coast Culinary
Symposium (SCA event) to help pay for keynote speakers’ travel costs.

Yes, it is a -translation- of the Radavansky transcription of the original
text.  The transcription came from a Hungarian website (link on my blog).
Oh, and Julia posted it below.


> Okay, the price didn't seem to be too bad, so I just ordered this.  I
> assume this will just be a translation. I hope I can figure out the
> recipes. I'm much more used to starting with a redaction and verifying that
> against the original recipe.


I didn’t want to do redactions in the book because I wanted people to do
their own—that said, the redactions I’ve done are on my blog as I come up
with them.  Octo-lutefisk is coming up ;). Glad to share my opinions if you
have questions, though.

Has anyone written a book review on this? I'd like to put that in the
> Florilegium.
> Stefan


If anyone -wants- to review it, that would be kind of cool.  It was
something of an amateur endeavor based on a crazy notion.


> Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2018 06:54:36 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Volker Bach <carlton_bach at yahoo.de>
>
>  No, it's going to be a reproduction, I assume. There is no translation of
> de Rontzier on the market that I'm aware of (I'll pitch one? to Prospect,
> but it's not really? as good a source as? Weckerin or Rumpoldt).
>
> de Rontzier is a? kind of? Rumpoldt copycat, another encyclopaedic cookery
> book by a court chef (Braunschweig in this case IIRC), but the recipes are
> oftenm less detailed and written in a far less entertaining style. His
> repertoire is also more limited, despite the pretense of breadth. He is
> useful along Rumpoldt, especially since he? has? some rtecipes for? simple
> dishes and always includes several variants, but it's not your? first
> choice for Renaissance German.


Wait, wait, wait...what?  Are we talking about the same book?  I was under
the impression we didn’t know who the author of The Science of Cooking was,
when he wrote it, and that he was Transylvanian, not German.  He certainly
self-identifies as Transylvanian often enough in the book.    It -does-
have a chapter that was apparently lifted (allegedly as a tribute) from one
of Doctor (husband to Anna) Wecker’s books, which I find hilarious.

------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2018 11:38:54 -0400
> From: Julia Szent-Gyorgyi <jpmiaou at gmail.com>
> Re: The Science of Cooking
>
> It's a crowd-funded translation, done by a guy who is neither a
> historian nor a cook, so there are a bunch of things he got wrong
> (such as pine nuts instead of juniper berries); Glenn has managed to
> fix the worst of these, based on input from my sister and me, but
> there are doubtless still things to fix. Another characteristic of the
> translation is that the translator's solution to the hard parts was to
> simply skip them, leading to some recipes that simply don't make any
> sense.
>

I would have been really in trouble without Julia and Marti.   I’m good
enough with medieval cooking to know the translation should have been “pot”
instead of “bowl”, but being sure that octopus really was octopus is out of
my skill-set.

If you encounter something that you can't make sense of, let me or
> Glenn know in some way, such as by posting to this list. I'll check
> the transcription (http://digitalia.lib.pte.hu/?p=2184#toc) and see
> what I can come up with, and Glenn will put it in the next update.
>
> Medieval Cookery (http://medievalcookery.com/etexts.html?Hungary) also
> has my translations of two (much) shorter recipe collections from the
> same time period and general area/school of cooking, plus my attempt
> at a basic glossary for the topic. There is a lot of overlap with the
> recipes in the Science of Cooking, so comparison and contrast can be
> edificatory. :-)
>
> Julia Kolosvari Arpadne
> /\ /\
> >*.*<
>
>