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All the King's Cooks: The Tudor Kitchens of King Henry VIII at Hampton Place
Peter Brears
Southover Press
ISBN: 0-285-63533-6
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Publisher's Notes:
Food historian and award-winning museum curator, Peter Brears presents a guide to the kitchens of Hampton Court Palace featuring authentic recipes of the period such as Salmon Roasted in Sauce, Chicken Farced, and Smothered Rabbit and White Leach (a luscious cool jelly). Illustrated with the author's own detailed drawings, and with eight pages of colour photographs showing the rooms in use, the clothes of the period and a range of dishes fit for a king, Brears's guide serves up the sights, sounds and smells of the Tudor era.
Anglo-saxon Food & Drink
Ann Hagen
Anglo-Saxon Books
ISBN: 1898281416
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Publisher's Notes:
The two earlier books A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food and A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink have been brough together in one volume. This provides a vast amount of information (544 pages) at a reasonable price.
A picture is provided of how food was grown, conserved, prepared and eaten during the period from the beginning of the 5th century to the 11th century.
Food production for home consumption was the basis of economic activity throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and ensuring access to an adequate food supply was a constant preoccupation. Used as payment and a medium of trade, food was the basis of the Anglo-Saxons' system of finance and administration. Information from literary and archaeological sources has been brought together for the first time to give insights into this important aspect of Anglo-Saxon life.
The west of Britain is also covered.
An extensive index enables the reader to quickly find specific information.
Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France
Jean-Louis Flandrin
University of California Press
ISBN: 0520238850
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Publisher's Notes:
The sequence in which food has been served at meals has changed greatly over the centuries and has also varied from one country to another, a fact noted in virtually every culinary history. Most food writers have treated the more significant alterations as stand-alone events. The most famous example of such a change occurred in the nineteenth century, when service à la française - in which the stunning presentation made a great show but diners had to wait to be served - gave way to service à la russe, in which platters were passed among diners who served themselves. But in Arranging the Meal, the late culinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin argues that such a change in the order of food service is far from a distinct event. Instead he regards it as a historical phenomenon, one that happened in response to socioeconomic and cultural factors - another mutation in an ever-changing sequence of customs. As France's most illustrious culinary historian, Flandrin has become a cult figure in France, and this posthumous book is not only his final word but also a significant contribution to culinary scholarship. A foreword by Beatrice Fink places Flandrin's work in context and offers a personal remembrance of this French culinary hero.
The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages
Terence Scully
Boydell Press
ISBN: 0-85115-430-1
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Publisher's Notes:
A compendium on practically all aspects of the art of cooking and dining... Because of the author's familiarity with all aspects of the subject we are offered this rara avis: a book which interests the specialist and the general reader; which allies common sense with scholarship; and which presents the theory and practice of medieval cooking for the scholar and the practitioner... has its place on the shelves of the practical cook as well as on those of the scholar: both can feed on it! HISTORY The master cook who worked in the noble kitchens of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had to be both practical and knowledgeable. His apprenticeship acquainted him with a range of culinary skills and a wide repertoire of seasonal dishes, but he was also required to understand the inherent qualities of the foodstuffs he handled, as determined by contemporary medical theories, and to know the lean-day strictures of the Church. Research in original manuscript sources makes this a fascinating and authoritative study where little hard fact had previously existed.
Boke of Keruynge
Peter Brears (ed.)
Southover Press
ISBN: 1-870962-19-2
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Publisher's Notes:
Wynkyn de Worde's elegant black-letter handbook, long out of print, remains a major source of information on the serving and eating of meals and feasts in the great houses of late medieval and early Tudor England. Southover's reprint carries a facsimile of the original text from Cambridge University Library, with a modern interpretation facing each page. The book explains in detail the intricate rituals of setting and waiting at table, how to prepare the dishes to be served and exactly what was eaten at different times of the year, and was written as an instruction manual for well-born boys as part of their early education. It also tells the reader how to carve meat, fowls and fish and to sauce each dish with its appropriate accompaniments, some of them very sophisticated. A description is included of the chamberlain's duties in his lord's chamber, dressing him and preparing him for church, and for bed. There is an interesting section on the order of precedence on feast days and great occasions.
Peter Brears writes an Introduction and provides a glossary and drawings to explain the complicated rituals, including the arrangement of cloths before and at the end of meals. His research into traditional domestic life, combined with extensive experience of cooking authentic meals in historic properties, has given him a unique knowledge of English food history. He was for twenty years director of York Castle as well as of Leeds City Museums. His books include The Gentlewoman's Kitchen (1984); Traditional Food in Yorkshire (1987); All the King's Cooks (1999), and The Compleat Housekeeper (2000).
The Book of Sent Soví
Joan Santanach (ed.)
Robin Vogelzang (trans.)
Tamesis Books
ISBN: 1855661640
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Publisher's Notes:
The Book of Sent Soví, composed around the middle of the fourteenth century, is the oldest surviving culinary text in Catalan. It is anonymous and, like the majority of medieval cookery books, is the product of a complex process of transmission, with multiple manuscript copies and readers who have left their mark on it. The contents are eminently practical. Successive cooks have recorded their own methods of preparing the dishes and recipes included, blending several culinary traditions in a single work. Sent Soví is also a reliable source of information on the cookery of the territories of the Crown of Aragon before the revolution caused by the arrival of products from the Americas.
This edition includes both an English translation, by Robin Vogelzang, and the original Catalan version. It has been the editor's aim to clarify the difficult passages in the book - sometimes corrupted because of the complex manuscript tradition - so that it can be understood as easily as possible by its twenty-first-century readers.
Chiquart's "On Cookery"
Terence Scully (trans.)
Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN: 0820403520
OUT OF PRINT
Publisher's Notes:
As chief cook of Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy (the future Pope Felix V), Chiquart was responsible both for the daily fare consumed at his master's court and for any formal Savoyard state banquets. The On Cookery, dictated by Chiquart in 1420, preserves precious evidence of how all of a chef's duties could be splendidly fulfilled in the most glorious European courts of his time. Chiquart provides detailed advice on how to arrange all the cooking facilities for a grand two-day banquet, to procure the huge quantities and variety of foodstuffs necessary, and then meticulously to prepare 81 of the most delicious dishes which might be served in it. The translator's Introduction examines Chiquart's unique work against the background of contemporary European culinary theory and practice.
Cooking & Dining in Medieval England
Peter Brears
Prospect Books
ISBN: 1903018552
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Publisher's Notes:
The history of medieval food and cookery has received a fair amount of attention from the point of view of recipes (of which many survive)and of the general context of feasts and feasting. It has never, as yet, been studied with an eye to the real mechanics of food production and service: the equipment used, the household organisation, the architectural arrangements for kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, larders, cellars, and domestic administration. This new work by Peter Brears, perhaps Britain's foremost expert on the historical kitchen, looks at these important elements of cooking and dining. He also subjects the many surviving documents relating to food service - household ordinances, regulations and commentaries - to critical study in an attempt to reconstruct the precise rituals and customs of dinner.
An underlying intention is to rehabilitate the medieval Englishman as someone with a nice appreciation of food and cookery, decent manners, and a delicate sense of propriety and seemliness. To dispel the myth, that is, of medieval feasting as an orgy of gluttony and bad manners, usually provided with meat that has gone slightly off, masked by liberal additions of heady spices.
A series of chapters looks at the cooking departments in large households:the counting house, dairy, brewhouse, pastry, boiling house and kitchen. These are illustrated by architectural perspectives of surviving examples in castles and manor houses throughout the land. Then there are chapters dealing with the various sorts of kitchen equipment: fires, fuel, pots and pans. Sections are then devoted to recipes and types of food cooked. The recipes are those which have been used and tested by Peter Brears in hundreds of demonstrations to the public and cooking for museum displays. Finally there are chapters on the service of dinner (the service departments including the buttery, pantry and ewery) and the rituals that grew up around these. Here, Peter Brears has drawn a wonderful strip cartoon of the serving of a great feast (the washing of hands, the delivery of napery, the tasting for poison, etc.) which will be of permanent utility to historical re-enactors who wish to get their details right.
Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650
Ken Albala
Greenwood Press
ISBN: 0313330964
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Ever get a yen for hemp seed soup, digestive pottage, carp fritters, jasper of milk, or frog pie? Would you like to test your culinary skills whipping up some edible counterfeit snow or nun's bozolati? Perhaps you have an assignment to make a typical Renaissance dish. The cookbook presents 171 unadulterated recipes from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Elizabethan era. Most are translated from French, Italian, or Spanish into English for the first time. Some English recipes from the Elizabethan era are presented only in the original if they are close enough to modern English to present an easy exercise in translation. Expert commentary helps readers to be able to replicate the food as nearly as possible in their own kitchens.
An introduction overviews cuisine and food culture in these time periods and prepares the reader to replicate period food with advice on equipment, cooking methods, finding ingredients, and reading period recipes. The recipes are grouped by period and then type of food or "course." Three lists of recipes-organized by how they appear in the book and by country and by special occasions-in the frontmatter help to quickly identify the type of dish desired. Some recipes will not appeal to modern tastes or sensibilities. This cookbook does not sanitize them for the modern palate. Most everything in this book is perfectly edible and, according to the author, noted food historian Ken Albala, delicious!
Concordance of English Recipes: Thirteenth through Fifteenth Centuries
Constance B. Hieatt, Terry Nutter, Johnna H. Holloway
Arizona Center for Medieval and Rennaissance Studies
ISBN: 0-86698-357-0 (paperback)
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Publisher's Notes:
This work is a concordance to culinary recipes recorded in England in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries: the earliest English culinary recipes on record. A few of medieval origin which continued to be recorded in the 16th and 17th centuries appear in an appendix. The recipes listed have all appeared in print; unpublished manuscripts known to the authors have been excluded since most readers would be unable to refer to them. Recipes are listed under their titles as they appear in the source manuscripts, collated in order alphabetically under their lemmatized recipe names.
Curye on Inglish
Constance B. Hieatt (ed.), Sharon Butler (ed.)
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0-19-722409-1
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Publisher's Notes:
This unique collection of recipes, or menus as they include not only how to make a dish but also how and when to serve it, has been compiled from more than twenty medieval manuscripts. The recipes date from the fourteenth century and are the earliest such examples in English. Interestingly, it appears that many of these recipes, found only on the menus of the upper classes, remained virtually unchanged until the sixteenth century.
The menus include the all-important order of serving, that strict etiquette that ruled medieval mealtimes, and which meant that most members of a household were only entitled to the first course and that the more delicate dishes were served only to the higher ranks. This too seems to have remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
Here we can also see how it was thought natural to take the most substantial foods first, leaving the richer and sweeter courses for later, much as we do today. We do not, however, include small game birds as part of 'dessert' as these menus do.
Presented here in early English, this invaluable collection gives great insight into the medieval kitchen and household, and is the perfect guide to modern recreations of medieval meals and feasts.
Eating Right in the Renaissance
Ken Albala
University of California Press
ISBN: 0520229479
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Publisher's Notes:
Eating right has been an obsession for longer than we think. Renaissance Europe had its own flourishing tradition of dietary advice. Then, as now, an industry of experts churned out diet books for an eager and concerned public. Providing a cornucopia of information on food and an intriguing account of the differences between the nutritional logic of the past and our own time, this inviting book examines the wide-ranging dietary literature of the Renaissance. Ken Albala ultimately reveals the working of the Renaissance mind from a unique perspective: we come to understand a people through their ideas on food.
Eating Right in the Renaissance takes us through an array of historical sources in a narrative that is witty and spiced with fascinating details. Why did early Renaissance writers recommend the herbs parsley, arugula, anise, and mint to fortify sexual prowess? Why was there such a strong outcry against melons and cucumbers, even though people continued to eat them in large quantities? Why was wine considered a necessary nutrient? As he explores these and other questions, Albala explains the history behind Renaissance dietary theories; the connections among food, exercise, and sex; the changing relationship between medicine and cuisine; and much more.
Whereas modern nutritionists may promise a slimmer waistline, more stamina, or freedom from disease, Renaissance food writers had entirely different ideas about the value of eating right. As he uncovers these ideas from the past, Ken Albala puts our own dietary obsessions in an entirely new light in this elegantly written and often surprising new chapter on the history of food.
Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations
D. Eleanor Scully, Terrence Scully
University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0-472-088777 (paperback)
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Publisher's Notes:
Early French Cookery introduces the general features of the food prepared for wealthy French households at the end of the Middle Ages. The volume presents over one hundred recipes, drawn from actual medieval manuscripts, and includes an overview of early French culinary traditions, foodstuffs, and methods of preparation. The authors help place these enticing recipes in context through a short survey of medieval dining behavior, and they give practical menu suggestions for simple meals and banquets that incorporate these delicious dishes.
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
Elizabeth David
Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 0140299742
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The English Housewife
Gervase Markham, Michael R. Best (ed.)
McGill-Queens University Press
ISBN: 0-773-511032
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Publisher's Notes:
In 1615 Englishman Gervase Markham published a handbook for housewives containing "all the virtuous knowledges and actions both of the mind and body, which ought to be in any complete housewife."
Markham reveals the "pretty and curious secrets" of preparing everything from simple foods to such elaborate meals as a "humble feast" - an undertaking which entails preparing "no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can stand on one table." He instructs the housewife on brewing beer and caring for wine, growing flax and hemp for thread, and spinning and dyeing. As a housewife was also responsible for the health and "soundness of body" of her family, he includes advice on the prevention of everything from the plague to baldness and bad breath.
No other source from this period provides the same richness of information in such a readable style. Michael Best's introduction and his abundant notes make The English Housewife readily accessible to the contemporary reader.
Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society
Bridget Ann Henisch
Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN: 0-271-00424-X
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"Although it is neither a detective story nor primarily a humorous work, there are elements of each in this lively and scholarly book on the broader aspects of food in the Middle Ages... If you would like to know how and when people fasted,... you can read about it here. You can also learn when to spit and how to share a drinking vessel with your neighbor with some delicacy. What was a banquet like?...If you are intrigued by any of this and much more besides, this is the book for you." -- Petits Propos Culinaires
Food and Eating in Medieval Europe
Martha Carlin (ed.) and Joel T. Rosenthal (ed.)
Hambledon Press
ISBN: 1-85285-148-1
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Publisher's Notes:
Eating and drinking are essential to life and therefore of great interest to the historian. As well as having a real fascination in their own right, both activities are an integral part of the both social and economic history. Yet food and drink, especially in the middle ages, have received less than their proper share of attention. The essays in this volume approach their subject from a variety of angles: from the reality of starvation and the reliance on 'fast food' of those without cooking facilities, to the consumption of an English lady's household and the career of a cook in the French royal household.
Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays
Melitta Weiss Adamson (ed.)
Garland Publishing
ISBN: 0-815-31345-4
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Publisher's Notes:
The enormous interest in recent years in the role of food in history has inspired this scholarly and entertaining collection of ten newly commissioned articles by medievalists from North America, Europe, and Australia that examines the subject of medieval food from a variety of disciplines including English, French, and German literature, history, and history of medicine. Up to now, there had been no such collection of in-depth, cross-cultural studies on medieval food in a variety of culinary, literary, and religious texts. An introduction and subject index are provided.
Food Through the Ages: From Stuffed Dormice to Pineapple Hedgehogs
Anna Selby
Remember When
ISBN: 1844680274
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With people's fascination for food increasing, there are more cookery shows and magazines than ever, Medieval banquets are sold-out events and classic recipes and ingredients are back in fashion, which is what this book sets out to explore. Highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each era from Roman times onwards. Anna recreates classic recipes from Epicurius' stuffed dormice to recipes which readers really will want to recreate. Anna explores how trade and improved transportation increased foodstuffs available and reflects on how we're returning to the old-fashioned notion of seasonal foods - just like our ancestors had to do.
The French Cook
Francois Pierre La Varenne
Southover Press
ISBN: 1-870-96217-6
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Publisher's Notes:
Published in 1651, this revolutionary recipe book represents a move away from peasant traditions, and lays the foundations of classic French cuisine. La Varenne's was the first recipe book to receive international acclaim, and influenced European cookery for many centuries to come. Little is known of La Varenne's life, or if he was responsible for the considerable innovations that appear in his books, but he was certainly the first to write them down. They include recipes for omelettes, ragouts, bisques and caramel, new ways of spicing and flavouring dishes, many new technical terms and such as a la mode, au bleu, and au naturel, and countless other ideas that had not been known before and have now become part of our repertoire. Introduction by Philip and Mary Hyman, whose knowledge of Varenne is unrivalled.
Good Housewife's Jewel
Maggie Black (ed.)
Southover Press
ISBN: 1-870-96212-5 (hardcover)
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NOTE: This edition does not contain the full text of the original. The editor states in her introduction that she removed unnecessary punctuation, changed the order of the recipes, and removed some recipes that were duplicated within the original. These edits significantly reduce the value of this source for serious research. I include the book on this list only because it appears to be the only edition of "Good Housewife's Jewel" currently in print, and therefore is better than nothing.
The Goodman of Paris (Le Ménagier de Paris)
Eileen Power (trans.)
Boydell Press
ISBN: 1-843-832224
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Publisher's Notes:
The Goodman of Paris (Le Ménagier de Paris) wrote this book for the instruction of his young wife around 1393. He was a wealthy and learned man, a member of that enlightened haute bourgeoisie upon which the French monarchy was coming to lean with increasing confidence. When he wrote his Treatise he was at least sixty but had recently married a young wife some forty years his junior. It fell to her to make his declining years comfortable, but it was his task to make it easy for her to do so. The first part deals with her religious and moral duties: as well as giving a unique picture of the medieval view of wifely behaviour it is illustrated by a series of stories drawn from the Goodman's extensive reading and personal experience. In the second part he turns from theory to practice and from soul to body, compiling the most exhaustive treatise on household management which has come down to us from the middle ages. Gardening, hiring of servants, the purchase and preparation of food are all covered, culminating in a detailed and elaborate cookery book. Sadly the author died before he could complete the third section on hawking, games and riddles. This unique glimpse of medieval domestic life presents a worldly, dignified and compelling picture in the words of a man of sensibility and substance. The distinguished historian EILEEN POWER was Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge.
The Great Household in Late Medieval England
C. M. Woolgar
Yale University Press
ISBN: 0-300-07687-8
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Publisher's Notes:
In the later medieval centuries, a whole range of important social, political, and artistic activities took place against the backdrop of the great English households. In this lively book, C. M. Woolgar explores the fascinating details of life in a great house. Based on extensive investigation of household accounts and related primary documents, Woolgar vividly illuminates the operations of great households. He also delineates the major changes that transformed the economy and geography of both lay and clerical households between 1200 and 1500.
In this portrait of aristocratic and gentry life in medieval England, Woolgar describes the roles of family members, the situations of servants, the uses of space within the household, food and drink for daily consumption and for special occasions, furnishing, clothing, arrangements for travel, household animals, cleanliness and hygiene, entertainment, the practices of religion, and intellectual life. The author also analyzes the qualitative and social evolution of great households as definitions of magnificence and conventions of etiquette became increasingly elaborate.
Libellus De Arte Coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book
Vincent F. Cuenca (trans.), Rudolf Grewe (ed.), Constance B. Hieatt (ed.)
Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies
ISBN: 0-866-98264-7
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The collection of medieval culinary recipes here published dates from the early thirteenth century and is likely to be the earliest witness we have to a number of recipes that appear again and again in later medieval collections. This critical edition of thirty-five recipes from four Danish, Icelandic, and Low German manuscripts records culinary themes that were to flourish throughout the later Middle Ages and is a major contribution to the literature on food. The volume includes translations, textual notes, a commentary, and detailed indices covering utensils, procedures, ingredients, dishes, and a glossary for each of the three languages.
Living and Dining in Medieval Paris
Nicole Crossley-Holland
University Of Wales Press
ISBN: 0-7083-1647-6
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Publisher's Notes:
A richly detailed account of the culinary world of fourteenth-century Paris. At the centre of this account lies the Ménagier de Paris, a medieval manuscript covering all aspects of food preparation and household skills, written by a well-to-do knight for his fifteen-year-old wife. Through her meticulous study of the manuscript, Nicole Crossley-Holland paints a vivid picture of life in the knight's household: his city residence with its walled vegetable and herb garden; his home farm which provided meat and dairy produce; the country estate where he trained sparrowhawks and hunted wild boar.
The author gives a comprehensive description of medieval food economy. Methods of food preservation, cooking techniques, recipes and presentation are thoroughly explored. Menus, ranging from the simple and everyday to elaborate wedding feasts, are described in detail.
The Medieval Kitchen
Odile Redon
University Of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0-226-70685-0
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Publisher's Notes:
The Medieval Kitchen is a delightful work in which historians Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi rescue from dark obscurity the glorious cuisine of the Middle Ages. Medieval gastronomy turns out to have been superb - a wonderful mélange of flavor, aroma, and color. Expertly reconstructed from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources and carefully adapted to suit the modern kitchen, these recipes present a veritable feast. The Medieval Kitchen vividly depicts the context and tradition of authentic medieval cookery.
The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano
Terence Scully (trans.)
University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0-472-10972-3
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Publisher's Notes:
The fields of cookery and medieval food have recently drawn the attention of those interested in a panoramic picture of aristocratic and bourgeois social life in the late Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, wealthy courts in the Italian peninsula led all of Europe in gastronomical achievement. The professional cooks in palaces such as those of the Este, Medici, and Borgia families were the most advanced masters of their craft, and some of them bequeathed a record of their practice in manuscript collections of recipes.
Outstanding among these early cookbooks is the one written by an anonymous master cook in Naples toward the end of the century. In its 220 recipes, we can trace not only the Italian culinary practice of the day but also the very refined taste brought by the Catalan royal family when they ruled Naples. This edition--with its introduction touching on the nature of cookery in the Neapolitano Collection, and its commentary on the individual recipes and its English translation of those recipes--will give the reader a glimpse into the rich fare available to occupants and guests of one of the greatest houses of late medieval Italy.
The Neapolitan Recipe Collection offers a particularly delicious slice of the primary documentation necessary for understanding the nature of medieval society and one of its most important aspects.
The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi
Terence Scully (trans.)
University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802096247
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Publisher's Notes:
Bartolomeo Scappi (c. 1500-1577) was arguably the most famous chef of the Italian Renaissance. He oversaw the preparation of meals for several Cardinals and was such a master of his profession that he became the personal cook for two Popes. At the culmination of his prolific career he compiled the largest cookery treatise of the period to instruct an apprentice on the full craft of fine cuisine, its methods, ingredients, and recipes. Accompanying his book was a set of unique and precious engravings that show the ideal kitchen of his day, its operations and myriad utensils, and are exquisitely reproduced in this volume.
Scappi's Opera presents more than one thousand recipes along with menus that comprise up to a hundred dishes, while also commenting on a cook's responsibilities. Scappi also included a fascinating account of a pope's funeral and the complex procedures for feeding the cardinals during the ensuing conclave. His recipes inherit medieval culinary customs, but also anticipate modern Italian cookery with a segment of 230 recipes for pastry of plain and flaky dough (torte, ciambelle, pastizzi, crostate) and pasta (tortellini, tagliatelli, struffoli, ravioli, pizza).
Terence Scully presents the first English translation of the work. His aim is to make the recipes and the broad experience of this sophisticated papal cook accessible to a modern English audience interested in the culinary expertise and gastronomic refinement within the most civilized niche of Renaissance society.
A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye
Anne Ahmed (ed.)
Corpus Christi College
ISBN: 0-9504261-3-X
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Publisher's Notes:
The original of A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye is in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, and was donated by Matthew Parker, the fourteenth Master, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. The book is thought to have been used by his wife Margaret.
Anne Ahmed, the wife of the present Master, has prepared this new edition of the book for the 650th anniversary celebrations of the College.
The original recipes are presented in facsimile alongside an interpretation. Updated versions of some of these recipes are included to encourage readers to try for themselves Margaret Parker's dishes from a bygone age.
This hardback book of 112 pages is delightfully illustrated and includes a brief introduction to the life and times of Matthew and Margaret Parker.
Reviews:
by Johnna Holloway for "Serve It Forth!"
The Spice Route: A History
John Keay
University of California Press
ISBN: 0520254163
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Publisher's Notes:
The Spice Route is one of history's greatest anomalies: shrouded in mystery, it existed long before anyone knew of its extent or configuration. Spices came from lands unseen, possibly uninhabitable, and almost by definition unattainable; that was what made them so desirable. Yet more livelihoods depended on this pungent traffic, more nations participated in it, more wars were fought for it, and more discoveries resulted from it than from any other global exchange. Epic in scope, marvelously detailed, laced with drama, The Spice Route spans three millennia and circles the world to chronicle the history of the spice trade. With the aid of ancient geographies, travelers' accounts, mariners' handbooks, and ships' logs, John Keay tells of ancient Egyptians who pioneered maritime trade to fetch the incense of Arabia, Graeco-Roman navigators who found their way to India for pepper and ginger, Columbus who sailed west for spices, de Gama, who sailed east for them, and Magellan, who sailed across the Pacific on the exact same quest. A veritable spice race evolved as the west vied for control of the spice-producing islands, stripping them of their innocence and the spice trade of its mystique. This enthralling saga, progressing from the voyages of the ancients to the blue-water trade that came to prevail by the seventeenth century, transports us from the dawn of history to the ends of the earth.
Spices And Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food
Johanna Maria Van Winter
Prospect Books
ISBN: 1903018455
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Publisher's Notes:
Throughout a long academic career in Holland, Johanna Maria van Winter has specialized in the study of food and drink in the Middle Ages. She has contributed several papers to learned journals and specialist conferences are gathered here within a single volume. The papers are printed for the most part in English but with some German and French texts.
The subjects break down into four groups: Medieval Food Habits; The Netherlands and their Neighbours; Fasting and Feasting; Food and Health. Invariably the work is founded on a close study of written sources, either the medieval records of towns and feudal lords of The Netherlands, early printed cookery books, or the best international scholarship.
Some of the topics discussed in this volume are: Fasting and asceticism in the Middle Ages; Fish recipes in late medieval and early modern cookery books; The use of cannabis in two cookery books of the fifteenth century; Green salads in the Renaissance; Invalid food in the fifteenth century; Regional cookery of the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages; Festive meals; Dining as a means of communication; The role of preserved food in Dutch medieval households.
Take a Thousand Eggs or More: A Collection of 15th Century Recipes
Cindy Renfrow
ISBN: 0898249503
Available from:
Poison Pen Press
Food Heritage Press
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice
Michael Krondl
Ballantine Books
ISBN: 034548083X
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From the Author's Website:
The Taste of Conquest tells the story of the legendary players in this global tale: of the ruthless merchants of Venice, of the conquistadors of Lisbon, and the single-minded businessmen of Amsterdam. It's a story about food, greed fashion and conquest.
Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books 1430-1450
Faulke Watling (ed.), Thomas Austin (ed.)
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0-85991-849-1
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Food Heritage Press
La Varenne's Cookery
François Pierre De La Varenne, Terence Scully (Trans.)
Prospect Books
ISBN: 1-903018-41-2 (paperback)
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Poison Pen Press
Publisher's Notes:
These three books by François Pierre de la Varenne (c. 1615-1678), who was chef to the Marquis d'Uxelles, are the most important French cookery books of the seventeenth century. It was the first French cookery book of any substance since Le Viandier almost 300 years before, and it ran to thirty editions in 75 years. The reason for its success was simply; it was the first book to record and embody the immense advances which French cooking had made, largely under the influence Italy and the Renaissance, since the fifteenth century. Some characteristics of medieval cookery are still visible, but many have disappeared. New World ingredients make their entrance. A surprising number of recipes for dishes still made in modern times (omelettes, beignets, even pumpkin pie) are given. The watershed from medieval to modern times is being crossed under our eyes in La Varenne's pages.
So important was this book that English cooks of the time immediately bought copies and one (anonymous) even translated it into English in the middle of the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell. This translation, as is the original, is extremely difficult to understand: there are difficult words, omissions, mistranslations, and other opacities. Terence Scully has solved all modern readers' problems by undertaking a modern translation with detailed commentary of the original French texts. His work takes cognisance of the early English translation, as well as not ignoring contemporary works available to those early cooks for purposes of comparison and contrast. Even French people will want to buy it for what he tells us of the workings of the French kitchen in the seventeenth century.
The Viandier of Taillevent
Terence Scully (trans.)
University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0-7766-0174-1
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Publisher's Notes:
This volume presents, for the first time, all four extant manuscripts of the "Viandier"'s recipes written in the fourteenth century by Guillaume Tairel. These manuscripts represent more than a century of modifications in gastronomic tastes and culinary practices in French seigneurial life. Also included are an extensive commentary, notes and bibliography as well as a glossary and modern adaptations of five recipes.
The Vivendier: A Fifteenth-Century French Cookery Manuscript
Terence Scully (trans.)
Prospect Books
ISBN: 0-907325-81-5
Available from:
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Poison Pen Press
Food Heritage Press
Publisher's Notes:
The Vivendier is a hitherto unpublished manuscript of more than sixty
recipes embedded within a miscellany of medical, botanical, household and
personal advice compiled in north-eastern France in the middle of the
fifteenth century. It is now housed in the Gesamthochschul-Bibliothek in
Kassel. Although deriving much of its contents from sources already known
to us, it is a unique and instructive collection. Terence Scully, who has
already edited the Viandier of Taillevent, and the treatise on cookery by
Maistre Chiquart, as well as writing the important book The Art of Cookery
in the Middle Ages, has done great service to scholars and enthusiasts of
medieval cooking by bringing this new source to their attention. The
edition provides the original text, a modern translation, critical notes on the language as well as the cookery, comparisons with extant manuscripts that provided source material, and a full introduction.
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