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Reviews and comments on the "Concordance of English Recipes. Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries" by Constance B. Hieatt and Terry Nutter with Johnna H. Holloway.

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Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:24:49 -0400

From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>

Subject: [Sca-cooks] Concordance of English Recipes

To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

Someone who doesn't take Petits Propos Culinaires

asked that I post the review of the Concordance.

Tom Jaine did the review which can be found in the June issue

of PPC 85. BTW Devra sells the book and will have copies at the War.

Johnnae

It reads:

Constance B. Hieatt and Terry Nutter with Johnna H. Holloway:

Concordance of English Recipes: Thirteenth through Fifteenth centuries

(Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, volume 312): Arizona Center for

Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona, paperback: ISBN

9780866983570: 136pp., 2006, $24.00.

I apologize for taking so long to notice the arrival of this important research

aid in which have been listed all the recipes so far in print from thirteenth-,

fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English texts. The concordance lists

first the original names of the recipes, then the lemmatized (standard)

names, then the printed source of the recipe and its approximate date.

The alphabetical order is determined by the lemmatized or standard

name. As can be imagined, this is already an invaluable tool to unscramble

the jumble of medieval names for the same recipe. The next assistant is a

glossary of recipe titles used as lemmas and a cross-index of variant titles.

This helps the befuddled. There is an appendix concordance of Renaissance

versions of medieval dishes printed in A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye,

A.W.?s A Booke of Cookrye, Thomas Dawson's The Good Housewife's Jewel, and

Gervase Markham's The English Housewife. This amazing help was originally

conceived and compiled by the late Professor Terry Nutter. Constance

Hieatt and Johnna Holloway completed the work after the untimely death

of Dr Nutter. We should be grateful to the Arizona Center at Tempe for

making this available to us in so clear and handsome a form.

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/kal69/shop/pages/ppc85_2.pdf">http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/kal69/shop/pages/ppc85_2.pdf

Creative Commons License

These reviews are published under the legal arrangements of Creative

Commons (see http://www.creativecommons.org.uk">www.creativecommons.org.uk). You may reprint the

reviews as many of them as you like without cost, provided that (1)

you acknowledge the source (PPC) and the authors, (2) you do not make

commercial use of them or alter them, and (3) you attach the CC symbol

to your re-use, so the spirit continues. In other words, the ideas and

information should circulate to everyone's benefit.

-----

More info on the Concordance from various sources. - Editor.

-----

Hieatt, Constance B., J. Terry Nutter, with Johnna H. Holloway. Concordance of English Recipes. Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries. Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2006. Medieval and Renaissance Tests and Studies, Volume 312. [Paperback. Introduction and Foreword Material: pp. vii-xvii. Sources: pp. xiii-xv. Concordance: pp. 1-105. Glossary: pp. 107-125. Appendix: pp. 127-135.]

This is the proper bibliographic entry according to the title page and cataloguing for the volume. Dr. Nutter and Ms. Holloway were mistakenly left off the cover. The MRTS website at http://www.asu.edu/clas/acmrs/publications/mrts/authors.html does in fact include both Nutter and Holloway as authors.

The Library of Congress cataloguing copy can be found at:

http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=1&;DB=local&CMD=010a+2006007496&CNT=10+records+per+page

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0610/2006007496.html for table of contents

CONTENTS

Preface vii

Introduction ix

Recipe Name x

Lemmatized Recipe Name x

Reference xii

Date xii

Sources xiii

Glossary/Index xv

Appendix: Renaissance Versions of Medieval English Recipes xvi

Concordance of English Recipes: 13th to 15th Century 1

Glossary of Recipe Titles Used as Lemmas and Cross-Index of 107

Variant Titles

Appendix: Renaissance Versions of Medieval English Recipes 127

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Cookery, English -- History -- To 1500.

Cookery, Medieval.

About the authors:

Prior to her death in June in 2001, Professor Jane Terry Nutter was at work on this concordance of English recipes and on research to sort out and clarify the surviving medieval corpus of recipes. She was working on the concordance in order that questions regarding changes in English recipes over time and patterns of consumption in England could be better understood. Professionally, Terry had earned her doctorate in the philosophy of mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. Following a teaching stint at Oregon State University, she returned to SUNY-Buffalo and earned a M.S. in computer science in 1984. Visiting appointments followed at Tulane, Virginia Tech, University of Connecticut, and the University of Mississippi. She had joined the faculty at Oklahoma State University at Tulsa in 1997.

Dr. Nutter was well known in Society culinary circles. Under the names THL Angharad ver’ Rhuawn and Katerine Rountre, she published widely, contributed to the Florilegium, and was active on the SCA Cooks List. She lived at various times in the Kingdoms of Meridies, Atlantia, and the East, before settling in the Kingdom of Ansteorra. She was also well known and responsible for a popular website titled: “Terry’s Culinary History Zone.” [It can still be glimpsed via the WayBack Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php. Input

http://linux.cottagesoft.com/~jtn/Culinary/culhistf.html ]

Some months after Terry’s death, Terry’s husband forwarded the concordance project on a number of computer disks to Professor Constance Hieatt. Along with a number of co-authors Dr. Hieatt is the author of such medieval culinary works as Pleyn Delit, Curye on Inglysch, An Ordinance of Pottage, and Libellus de Art Coqunaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book. She is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Western Ontario University. Dr. Hieatt wasn’t able to unlock the disks as they were, so the project sat again for a period of months. In the meantime librarian Johnna Holloway had been in touch with Professor Hieatt once again about the Pynson volume at Longleat and Hieatt’s new edition of that work. In 2003 Hieatt sent Johnna the disks with the files. It then took a number of weeks to locate and transfer the material off the disks as they were recorded in an outdated computer program that only ran on older version MAC’s. With the help of her husband Professor James Holloway and some notable others (insert – Phil Troy here?), the material was eventually transferred into files that could be worked on PC’s. Johnna then sent the files back to Hieatt, thinking that her part was done.

Then quite suddenly in mid 2004 came the invitation from Professor Hieatt to help edit the final project. In many ways this seemed very suitable. Unknown to Hieatt was the fact that Johnna (as Lady Johnnae llyn Lewis) had known Terry Nutter and that Terry (as Lady Angharad) had attended an event on culinary history that Johnnae had run in Atlantia back in 1987. They had re-established contact back in 2001 and were corresponding on things just prior to Terry’s passing. It was Johnna who then wrote the obituary for Terry that appeared in Serve It Forth. Knowing that she was probably one of the few people who already had at hand all the necessary texts for checking the entries, Johnna agreed to undertake the task in summer 2004. So it was another Society member known for her publications in Tournaments Illuminated, her work on SCA Cooks, and for her research skills that did most of the final editing of the Concordance and its almost 2800 entries. Professor Hieatt was responsible for the final proofreading and submission of the manuscript to MRTS. It was published in late April 2006.

About the work—

The publisher MRTS describes the work as follows:

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.

The work is a Concordance, which means that it is by definition “an alphabetical index of the principal words in a book or the works of an author with their immediate contexts.” In this case it’s a recipe concordance. It doesn’t include the recipes; it just helps you locate the recipes! It’s better to think of it as a cross-index. On a basic level, it’s a companion tool to identify types of recipes and to serve as a quick way to identify which collection to look in for certain recipes. The recipes are grouped by a scheme that collates the lemmatized entries together. [lemmatized, lemmatizing

1. To organize (words in a text) so that all inflected and variant forms of the same word are grouped together under one lemma or headword. http://www.allwords.com/word-lemmatized.html ]

This makes it easy to look up recipes that involve say “Pevorade for Venison” and locate all the recipes in one place as opposed to having to look in all the separate collections. A number of those collections aren't even indexed. One can then pull from the shelf the right volume. As a research tool for Society cooks, the Concordance allows an entrant to come up with recipes that might or might not be alike. One can note for instance that a recipe 103 from one collection is like MS A’s recipe 105 and MS G’s 110. It pulls together recipes, in other words, and that is very valuable for those that research in this important area.

The Concordance does not include recipes that have not appeared in print. The work still covers approximately 23 collections of published recipes that range from the well-known (Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books) to the obscure Harleian 5401 collection of c1490. Full bibliographic details are provided for locating these collections.

One practical suggestion has been made that what everyone seeking to work with these collections needs to do is xerox yet again another copy of all the articles, three hole punch them, and place them in a binder to go along with the hardbound books. Then in about 6 inches of shelf space, you would have the canon and the index. Convenient and ready for research!)

Is the Concordance valuable?

Professional food historians in France have included it among the 2006 publications section of the website Alimentation

which looks at "Moyen Âge ou de la gastronomie historique"

http://www.ext.upmc.fr/urfist/menestrel/medalP.htm

[It's run by Alban Gautier, Bruno Laurioux et Yann Morel]

The entry reads:

Constance B. Hieatt, Terry Nutter, avec la collaboration de Johanna H. Holloway,/ Concordance of English Recipes : Thirteenth through Fifteenth Centuries/, Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 312)

[En se fondant sur les recettes déjà publiées, les auteurs ont établi une liste des titres originaux et lemmatisés qui rendra de grands services aux chercheurs ; il faut en souhaiter l'extension aux recueils encore manuscrits, dont Constance B. Hieatt est l'infatigable éditrice]