(no subject)

[coraa]

If I was going to have a proper blog (like, a focused-on-a-single-subject blog, rather than my LJ, which contains pretty much whatever has caught my attention at the moment), it'd be on the history of food and particularly of historical cooking and cookbooks. My collection of medieval cookbooks is now up to nearly 20 (either in Middle English or translated; I could have more if I extended it to include cookbooks I can't read, but that's not very useful), and that's not even counting the tremendous wealthy of 18th and 19th-century cookbooks still extant. And I love to take a medieval recipe, parse it, and mess around with it in the kitchen until I've made a good dish out of it.

I'd love to cook an authentic medieval feast for friends, but a) I know a lot of vegetarians, and most existing medieval recipes (by dint of only the nobility keeping cookbooks) are meat-heavy, and b) even recipes from as recently as the 1920s and 30s often taste a bit odd to the modern palate, and so it's pretty much restricted to people who will try just about anything. I could probably get around the first (there are enough Lent recipes to put a fair number of vegetarian dishes on the table, though vegan would be harder), but the second would be tricky.

(I am in the process of handwashing jmpava's grandparents' fancy china. Dinner service for ten, or tea for a dozen. I seriously need to have a dinner party, or at least afternoon tea.)

Comments

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

Lessee, old cookbooks. I've got a few cookbooks downstairs that I've been slowly digitizing. Unfortunately, most of them are in Latin or German, and not a few are of a medicinal nature (how to cure the ague with a mixture of betony, tincture of poppy, tobacco juice, rose water, and aqua vita (i.e., booze)). Altamiras is, however, a true cookbook and in Spanish (which surely at least one of your friends should know). The others are in Shakesperian English and are mostly herbal/apothecarial recipes - but if you want a good recipe for rosewater, or tincture-of-whatever as a digestif, they're appropriate.

Altamiras, Juan, Nuevo arte de cocina sacado de las escuela de la experiencia economica, Barcelona, 1770. Spanish cookbook, somewhat reminiscent of Julia Child in style and tone: The recipes run along the lines of "You will take your chickens . . ." Quantities are vague. Dishes include young cucumbers stuffed with meat and squash, adobo-seasoned fish, artichokes cooked with bacon, garbanzos "popular style," and leche helada (a kind of ice cream, made with sweetened milk, cinnamon, and ice)

The newe iewell of health : wherein is contayned the most excellent secretes of phisicke and philosophie, deuided into fower bookes, in the which are the best approued remedies for the diseases as well inwarde as outwarde, of all the partes of mans bodie : treating very amplye of all dystillations of waters, of oyles, balmes, quintessences, with the extraction of artificiall saltes, the vse and preparation of antimonie, and potable gold / gathered out of the best and most approved authors, by that excellent Doctor Gesnerus ; also the pictures, and maner to make the vessels, furnaces, and other instrumentes there unto belonging, by Konrad Gesner; published by Geoge Baker and Henry Denham, 1576. First edition.

The treasury of healthe conteynyng many profitable medycines gathered out of Hypocrates, Galen and Avycen, 1550.

I also have digitized a handwritten French/Provencal book of household accounts and recipes; know anyone who reads Middle French?

....and just in case, why, look, a collection of old recipe books (http://www.thousandeggs.com/cookbooks.html)!

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Never mind the 1920s and 1930s -- recipes from the 1950s can be rather odd. These days, people don't cook hamburgers in butter.