Subject: summary cookbook recommendations

From: [email-masked] (Allan Terry)
Date: 22 Dec 92 23:10:10 GMT

I asked for recommendations on cookbooks about historic cooking and promised
a summary.  Here it be:

I recommend "Elinor Fettiplaces Receipt Book", early 1600's English Cooking.
It also has lots of lovely data about the housekeeping and so on.
               [email-masked]

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There is an SCA vendor that sells many cookbooks.
Write me if you want further recommndations.
  Poison Pen Press
  627 East 8th Street
  Brooklyn NY 11218
  no phone listed on my handout.
Mark Schuldenfrei ([email-masked])

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	Here are two books we recommend:

1) FOOD IN HISTORY by Reay Tannahill, published by Crown Press, New
York,1989.
 In 400 pages the book covers food & foodstuffs from prehistoric times to
the present. It has an excellent bibliography for further research.

2)A lovely, fun & extremely readable essay by Jean-Francois Revel called in
the original French: La sensibilite gastronomique de l'antiquite a nos
jours: un festin en paroles. We can't remember the title in English but we
know for sure that it has been translated, a possible title is: A FEAST OF
WORDS.

Have fun,

& if you come across good books in this line of thought, please let us
know. (By e-mail is easiest but we may meanwhile figure out how to post
to the usenet group).

Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris
[email-masked] (Pierre Joris)

PS. Here's one of our favorite cookbooks on Mediterranean cooking:
HONEY FROM THE WEEDS by Patience Gray. Great writing, great food.

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From: "Ronald F. Feldstein" <[email-masked]>

A new translation of a famous 19th cent. Russian cookbook has just been
made by the Indiana University Press.  If interested, call 1-800-842-6796
and ask for Classic Russian Cooking, by Elena Molokhovets.

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From: [email-masked] (Justin du Coeur MKA Mark Waks)

Odds are that you'll get several recommendations of this, but in case
you haven't --

The single best book on Renaissance cooking, especially if you want
reconstructions, is _Pleyn Delit_ by Hieatt (sp?) and Butler. It has
the originals, accompanied by reasonably reliable reconstructions.
I believe that all sources are circa 15th century.

I've got a couple dozen Renaissance cookbooks, but this is the one
I most often recommend...

(The other really good one is _A Miscellany_, which is privately
published by David Friedman, who shows up on rec.food.historic from
time to time. This is a fairly thick book of articles relevant to
the SCA, but about half of it is recipes and their reconstructions.
This is the only good source of reconstructions of period Islamic
cooking that I know...)
				-- Justin du Coeur

----

>From: [email-masked]

 _The Medieval Cookbook_ by Maggie Black

If you already have the EETS _Cury on Inglysh_ and _Two Fifteenth
Century Cookery Books,_ then you already have most of the recipes
in this book.  (There are also recipes from Le Menagier de Paris
and some other MSS. that I'm not familiar with.)

However ....

The illustrations are copious and beautiful.  I saw one lady, an
expert in cooking from original sources and owner of a sizeable
library of same, who snatched up a copy of this book, crying, "Look!
period table settings!"

The author is, by her own acknowledgement, strongly influenced by
Constance Hieatt.  She gives the original recipes; she gives the
_source_ of each recipe; and her redactions are reasonable.  Mostly
she follows the original recipe closely; when she departs from it,
it's in the interest of being more accessible to the 20th century
eater.  For instance, her redaction of Egurdouce (C. on I. IV:23)
begins, "Although the old recipe starts with a fry-up in plenty of
fat, oven browning (a less fatty method than frying) suits our taste
better today.  Other recipes for this dish add a breadcrumb thickening,
so I have provided that choice too."

In a couple of places she points out that we have (almost) no medieval
bread recipes, and provides workable equivalent recipes for pandemayne
and monastic barley bread.  There's also a chapter on "herbals and
simples"--with a disclaimer at the beginning of the book that they
are for "historical interest only" and you shouldn't try doctoring
yourself with them.

If, as I said before, you already have the EETS editions, you don't
_need_ this book.  I think you will probably _want_ it, because it
is so beautifully illustrated; but you don't have to get it right
away.  Wait till you get a royalty or a residual or a check from
Uncle George, or whatever form small windfalls take in your life;
or get somebody to give it to you for Christmas.

Or _give_ it to somebody for Christmas.  I think this book would be
ideal for someone who is already a fair cook, is interested in medieval
cookery, but can't quite cope yet with the lack of measurements and
all that Middle English.

I don't think I want to take this book into the kitchen--I'd hate to
get grease and glop on the beautiful pages--but I've marked about a
dozen pastie and other finger-food recipes that I'm going to xerox 
and try out for Twelfth Night.

Dorothea of Caer-Myrddin                               Dorothy J. Heydt
Mists/Mists/West                                              Albany CA

	An Ordinance Of Pottage - An edition of the fifteenth century
	culinary recipes in Yale University's MS Beinecke 163
	Constance B. Hieatt, Prospect Books 1988
	ISBN 0 907325 38 6
	[distributed in USA by University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville
	 Virginia 22903]

This is a collection of almost 200 recipes. The recipes are given in 
middle english (ie. as written) and a large number have been translated/
adapted for modern usage. There is a full glossary. I have only skimmed
it so far, but I'm very impressed. The adapted recipes keep closely to the
originals and help make sense of some of the stranger instructions. Unlike
some medieval cookbooks this one has a full range of recipes - from quite
simple soppes and pottages, through to pygges yfarced and rosted crane.
I find the levantine recipes quite interesting - meat balls in a syrian
sauce! especially when comparing them to modern middle eastern recipes.
[there is about as much similarity as between a British Imperial curry
and true Indian subcontinent cooking] still, they taste good.

BTW I picked this one up in a bookshop specialising in cookbooks:

	Books for Cooks - The Cook Book Shop
	4 Blenheim Crescent (off Portobello Rd.)
	London W11 1NN
	Tel: 071-221 1992

I'll have to save up my pennies, and extend the book shelf I think.

--
	Alan Deacon
	Central Computing Service		Email: [email-masked]