// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did "Utilis Coquinario" say to the chef? "You can cook on me.
Utilis Coquinario ('Useful for the Kitchen'[1]) is an English cookery book written in Middle English in the late fourteenth[2] or very early fifteenth century.[3] The text is contained in the Hans Sloane collection of manuscripts in the British Library and is numbered Sloane MS 468.[4][5]
Author
[edit]The author's name is unknown. It has been theorised that he was "the high-ranking chef of a large kitchen", though not one as large as that of Richard II (for example, compare this text to The Forme of Cury).[6] It is accordingly assumed that he was a man.[7][a] The resemblance of some of the author's recipes to early French recipes indicates the author may have had a reading knowledge of Middle French.[7] The author's references to "fyssh day" and Lent indicate that the author cooked for a Christian household.[8]
Text
[edit]Contents
[edit]The manuscript contains recipes for things such as butter of almond milk,[9] roasted duck,[10] a meat pottage[11] and a sweet-and-sour fish preparation.[12][13] The manuscript is loosely organised and has no real system beyond a basic grouping of recipes for cooking birds, blancmange, and fruits and flowers.[1][7]
Purpose
[edit]It has been suggested that the text was not intended as a cookbook for the layperson since the level of lay literacy at the time was still relatively low and distribution of manuscripts was a "patchy affair".[14] Several alternative purposes for its creation have been proposed, including: serving as testimony to the author's culinary skill,[14] presenting and influencing trends,[14] securing the status of the chef as a professional,[14] and serving as a tool for professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers) aspiring to raise their class status by learning about higher-class meals.[15] The latter theory has been proposed in part due to the text's location in the Sloane collection of manuscripts, where it is placed in a selection of medical recipes described as "utilitarian".[16]
Modern study
[edit]The text is notable to both culinary historians and linguists, containing several examples of unique recipes and vocabulary.
Historical interest
[edit]Of historical interest, the work contains the only references to recipes such as pyany (a poultry dish garnished with peonies) and heppee (a rose-hip broth).[14] The text was written in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer and provides insight into the types of food Chaucer may have eaten and written about.[17] As was the case with most late medieval cooking, the author did not associate colours with specific flavours, but he did occasionally use colour to denote contrasts in flavour.[18] For example, one of the included fish recipes uses saffron in part of the dish flavoured with sugar and ginger (giving that part a reddish, saffron colour), and leaves the remaining part of the dish white to denote that it is flavoured with sugar only.[18]
Linguistic interest
[edit]Of linguistic interest, it contains the only known references in fourteenth-century English texts to cormorants and finches.[14] Additionally, it contains the only references to woodcocks, botores (bittern), pluuers (plovers), and teals in fourteenth-century English cookbooks, though all are found elsewhere in menus of that era.[14]
See also
[edit]Footnotes
[edit]Citations
[edit]- 1 2 Notaker 2017, p. 89.
- ↑ Carroll 1996, p. 45.
- ↑ Hieatt 1985, p. 19.
- ↑ Kernan 2016, p. 64.
- ↑ "Entry for "Cookery Recipes in BL MS Sloane 468" in Middle English Compendium HyperBibliography". quod.lib.umich.edu. University of Michigan. Retrieved 31 July 2018.
- ↑ Carroll 1996, p. 48.
- 1 2 3 4 Carroll 1996, p. 46.
- ↑ Carroll 1996, pp. 47, 50.
- ↑ Matterer, James L. "Medieval Recipe Translations – Botere of almand melk". www.godecookery.com.
- ↑ Matterer, James L. "Malardis". www.godecookery.com.
- ↑ Matterer, James L. "Medieval Recipe Translations – Chauden for potage". www.godecookery.com.
- ↑ Matterer, James L. "A dauce egre". www.godecookery.com.
- ↑ "MS BL Sloane 468". www.medievalcookery.com.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Carroll 1996, p. 47.
- ↑ Kernan 2016, pp. 13–14, 64–65.
- ↑ Kernan 2016, pp. 64–65.
- ↑ Matterer, James. "Chaucer and Food". Food in the Arts. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- 1 2 Woolgar 2017, pp. 18–19.
Bibliography
[edit]- Carroll, Ruth (1996). "Utilis Coquinario and its Unnamed Author" (PDF). In Walker, Harlan (ed.). Cooks & Other People: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995. Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books. ISBN 978-0-907325-72-7. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
- Hieatt, Constance B.; Butler, Sharon, eds. (1985). Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (including the Forme of Cury). Early English Text Society Supplementary Series. Vol. 8. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-722409-0.
- Kernan, Sarah Peters (2016). "For al them that delight in Cookery": The Production and Use of Cookery Books in England, 1300–1600 (PDF) (PhD thesis). Ohio State University. OCLC 958832793. Archived from the original on 31 July 2018. Retrieved 20 October 2024.
- Notaker, Henry (2017). A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Univ. of California Press. ISBN 9780520294004. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- Woolgar, C.M. (21 November 2017). "Medieval Food and Colour" (PDF). Journal of Medieval History. 44 (1): 1–20. doi:10.1080/03044181.2017.1401391. S2CID 165273557.