Journal Competition: Feast Cooking
For my second entry in the journal competition, I have decided to enter my research for the feast I am doing in April, with Mistress Katherina acting as steward and Maestra di Ballo.
I haven't done much SCA cooking before, beyong breakfasts/snacks at St Cath's and kitchen prep for other people, but I have quite a good background in cooking generally which I think will help. I also haven't done any cooking research beyong a bit of basic internet searching, and I haven't done any recipe redactions, but I'm quite used to cooking without a recipe or having to interpret/adjust quantities, and I think redacting from actual extant recipes will be quite interesting. The only online cookboks I've really looked at are all German because Meesteresse Willemyne showed them to me, so from the perspective of finding sources to use I need to start from scratch because Mistress Katherine and I have decided to do a 16th century Italian ball. Also it is going to have a "harvest" them (the other possibility was Lent), so I need to research harvest traditions as well.
Today I started researching through two streams. The first search I did was through google, searching "16th Italian recipes", which gave me a couple of good leads.
The first was to Mistress Helewyse's website - she has done quite a lot of work using 16th century Italian sources.
Her website is at http://www.geocities.com/helewyse
She recommends Bartolomeo Scappi's "Opera dell'arte del cucinare" as the ultimate 16th century Italian cooking source - apparently it has over 1000 recipes and 328 complete menus.
Also on her website she has some translations and transcriptions of cheesemaking in 16th century Italy, which look quite interesting and I might follow them up again later, although I think at the moment it's not a good idea to veer off on a completely new tangent.
However, should I want to, one of the sources she has both transcribed and translated is Gallo Agostino Le Vinit gionarte dell'agricoltura et de'piaceri della villa, p224-229 but her link to an online transcription is broken.
She also translates part of a physician's manual concerned with cheesemaking, of which three different extant versions are available at http://gallica2.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k602520.image or http://gallica2.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWireIndex=index&p=1stq=compendio+de+i+secreti+rationali+&lang=en
I also visited "A Temperance of Cooks" at http://www.whirlwind-design.com/ATOC/temperance.html but I think this site made reference to 16th century Italian (Florentine) eating traditions, but drew on 15th century sources for any actual recipes/redactions, which was frustrating.
Stefan's Florilegium, which I got to through my second search stream, which was the Kingdom of Atlantia Arts & Sciences links page, had a good bibliography of cooking sources listed, but only three sixteenth century Italian ones, all of which I have yet to track down.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-BOOKS/16thC-cookbk-bib.html
The books are:
Casagrande, G. "Gola e Predigliera nella clausura dell'ultimo '500"
di Messibugo, C. "Libro Novo nel qual s'insegna a far d'ogni sorte di vivance"
Roselli, G. "Epulario il quale tratta del modo di cucinare ogni carne, uccelli, e pesci di ogni sorte"
The other major issue I foresee is that I don't speak or read Italian. Yet.
I think "pesci" is fish, "del modo di cucinare" is the mode/method of preparation/cooking.
Scappi I found mentioned a few places, and a quick search of Amazon reveals that a copy translated by Terence Scully can be mine for all of my Amazon book vouchers plus some plus postage, but I think it would be worthwhile getting.
I also found a bibliography of cooking resources by a cooking laurel at http://www.whirlwind-design.com/madbaker/biblio.html which was useful and interesting. He hadn't listed the Scappi, but had to say of other books by Scully that they were all very well researched and highly worthwhile.
He also highly recommended Martino of Como; Luigi Ballerini, ed., Jeremy Parzen, trans., "The Art of Cooking" The First Modern Cooking Book" (2005) which is also available through Amazon.
In other interesting books he mentioned, there's Columella, L. "On Agriculture" which is a Roman source on preserving/pickilng. Also Desportes, Francois "Le Pain au Moyen Age" which I would be very interested in looking at in the future, as I've always enjoyed making bread and it primarily covers French sources. Also Thrupp, Sylvia "The Worshipful Company of Bakers: A Short History" which is English. But that's for later.
I think the next stage is to either find copies of the Scappi and Como books, or, more likely, order them, which will mean a necessary delay in this aspect of research but enable me to research harvest practices in the meantime.
I haven't done much SCA cooking before, beyong breakfasts/snacks at St Cath's and kitchen prep for other people, but I have quite a good background in cooking generally which I think will help. I also haven't done any cooking research beyong a bit of basic internet searching, and I haven't done any recipe redactions, but I'm quite used to cooking without a recipe or having to interpret/adjust quantities, and I think redacting from actual extant recipes will be quite interesting. The only online cookboks I've really looked at are all German because Meesteresse Willemyne showed them to me, so from the perspective of finding sources to use I need to start from scratch because Mistress Katherine and I have decided to do a 16th century Italian ball. Also it is going to have a "harvest" them (the other possibility was Lent), so I need to research harvest traditions as well.
Today I started researching through two streams. The first search I did was through google, searching "16th Italian recipes", which gave me a couple of good leads.
The first was to Mistress Helewyse's website - she has done quite a lot of work using 16th century Italian sources.
Her website is at http://www.geocities.com/helewyse
She recommends Bartolomeo Scappi's "Opera dell'arte del cucinare" as the ultimate 16th century Italian cooking source - apparently it has over 1000 recipes and 328 complete menus.
Also on her website she has some translations and transcriptions of cheesemaking in 16th century Italy, which look quite interesting and I might follow them up again later, although I think at the moment it's not a good idea to veer off on a completely new tangent.
However, should I want to, one of the sources she has both transcribed and translated is Gallo Agostino Le Vinit gionarte dell'agricoltura et de'piaceri della villa, p224-229 but her link to an online transcription is broken.
She also translates part of a physician's manual concerned with cheesemaking, of which three different extant versions are available at http://gallica2.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k602520.image or http://gallica2.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWireIndex=index&p=1stq=compendio+de+i+secreti+rationali+&lang=en
I also visited "A Temperance of Cooks" at http://www.whirlwind-design.com/ATOC/temperance.html but I think this site made reference to 16th century Italian (Florentine) eating traditions, but drew on 15th century sources for any actual recipes/redactions, which was frustrating.
Stefan's Florilegium, which I got to through my second search stream, which was the Kingdom of Atlantia Arts & Sciences links page, had a good bibliography of cooking sources listed, but only three sixteenth century Italian ones, all of which I have yet to track down.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-BOOKS/16thC-cookbk-bib.html
The books are:
Casagrande, G. "Gola e Predigliera nella clausura dell'ultimo '500"
di Messibugo, C. "Libro Novo nel qual s'insegna a far d'ogni sorte di vivance"
Roselli, G. "Epulario il quale tratta del modo di cucinare ogni carne, uccelli, e pesci di ogni sorte"
The other major issue I foresee is that I don't speak or read Italian. Yet.
I think "pesci" is fish, "del modo di cucinare" is the mode/method of preparation/cooking.
Scappi I found mentioned a few places, and a quick search of Amazon reveals that a copy translated by Terence Scully can be mine for all of my Amazon book vouchers plus some plus postage, but I think it would be worthwhile getting.
I also found a bibliography of cooking resources by a cooking laurel at http://www.whirlwind-design.com/madbaker/biblio.html which was useful and interesting. He hadn't listed the Scappi, but had to say of other books by Scully that they were all very well researched and highly worthwhile.
He also highly recommended Martino of Como; Luigi Ballerini, ed., Jeremy Parzen, trans., "The Art of Cooking" The First Modern Cooking Book" (2005) which is also available through Amazon.
In other interesting books he mentioned, there's Columella, L. "On Agriculture" which is a Roman source on preserving/pickilng. Also Desportes, Francois "Le Pain au Moyen Age" which I would be very interested in looking at in the future, as I've always enjoyed making bread and it primarily covers French sources. Also Thrupp, Sylvia "The Worshipful Company of Bakers: A Short History" which is English. But that's for later.
I think the next stage is to either find copies of the Scappi and Como books, or, more likely, order them, which will mean a necessary delay in this aspect of research but enable me to research harvest practices in the meantime.