Fabulous-Fsts-msg - 4/12/08 Reviews and comments about the book "Fabulous Feasts" by Madeleine Pelner Cosman. NOTE: See also the files: cookbooks-msg, cooking-bib, cookbooks-bib, cookbooks2-bib, cookbooks-SCA-msg, cb-rv-Apicius-msg, cb-novices-msg, books-food-msg. ************************************************************************ NOTICE - This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday. This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter. The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors. Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the originator(s). Thank you, Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous Stefan at florilegium.org ************************************************************************ From: TALLAN at flis.utoronto.CA (David Tallan) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: re:forwarded recipe Date: 19 Apr 1993 13:46:43 -0400 > Greetings from one who is new to the net and the SCA, but not to medieval > cooking: > > I have a very good book of recipes called "Fabulous Feasts" by Madeleine > Pelner Cosman which covers what was eaten, how it was presented and what > what was available. Definitely two thumbs up! This book has a whole > section on Appetizers. As someone who has been collecting medieval cookbooks for quite a while I would advise anyone new to medieval cookery to treat _Fabulous Feasts_ with a great deal of caution. While it does indeed contain many recipes which purport to be medieval, there is no indication of what the basis is on which they make that claim. In other words, unlike many medieval cookbooks on the market today, the original recipes are not given with the author's adaptations, nor is there ANY indication of what the source is. As a number of the recipes include Out Of Period ingredients, I think it is fair to say that, while any particular recipe in the book MIGHT be period, it might just as well not. And one has know way of telling which is which. David/Thomas David Tallan (tallan at flis.utoronto.ca) snail: 42 Camberwell Rd. Toronto ON M6C 3E8 From: silbrmnd at acf4.nyu.edu (The Dark Mage) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: Fabulous Feasts (was: Re: veggie feasts) Date: 4 Apr 1994 05:32:34 GMT Hey.... I was at the Met on friday, got a couple of neat books (and drooled over a bunch more ;) including one called "Fabulous Feasts: Medieval cookery and ceremony" by Madeleine Pelner Cosman... Started reading it the other day, it's really kew-ul... The first half of it talks about everything from descriptions of feasts in contemporary literature to a discussion of ingredients to how to prepare a medieval feast today (including setting up the room so it looks period and has lots of atmosphere without completely remodelling your house ;) The book has lots of illustrations from period manuscripts (some b&w, some color plates). Some of the chapter headings: "A Chicken for Chaucer's Kitchen: Medieval london's market laws and Larcenies", "Fountain, River, Privy, Pot: Medieval London's Polluted Waters", and "Sex, Smut, Sin, and Spirit: Medieval Food and Character".... The second half contains "Over 100 recipies from medieval manuscripts" translated into modern english (just wish she'd included the original text, tho, those are fun to try and figure out :) The bibliography is a 20 page list of manuscripts, archive aids, and readings. Haven't tried anything yet (I sorta have a vague idea how to cook ;) but once I move out of the dorm and get a place that has a kitchen I'll try out some of this stuff and write up some sort of review... ObVegetarianStuff: She divides the recipies into 9 categories, and mentions that there should be at least 1 dish from each category in a feast... merging meat fish and fowl into one group, and making "Spectacle, Sculpture and Illusion Food" very optional, that still leaves 5 categories: m/f/f; Appetizers, cheese, and appetizing aphrodisiacs; soups, sauces, and spiced wines; breads and cakes; vegetables and vegetarian variations; fruit and flower desserts. There usually _are_ all well represented at feasts - there's a lot of room for _everyone_ to be able to eat _something_... :) -Gabrielle the Clueless ----------------------------------------------+------------------------- "Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to | net.name: DarkMage make this comparison -- is a disease: | IRC handle: Morpheus sexually transmitted, and invariably FATAL..."| SCA persona: Gabrielle - Death | silbrmnd at acf4.nyu.edu ----------------------------------------------+------------------------- From: sbloch at ms.uky.edu (Stephen Bloch) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: Re: Fabulous Feasts (was: Re: veggie feasts) Date: 4 Apr 1994 12:41:59 -0400 Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences The Dark Mage wrote: >Hey.... I was at the Met on friday, got a couple of neat books (and >drooled over a bunch more ;) including one called "Fabulous Feasts: >Medieval cookery and ceremony" by Madeleine Pelner Cosman... Started >reading it the other day, it's really kew-ul.... Fabulous Feasts does indeed have plenty of good illustrations, and some interesting commentary. The recipes, unfortunately, are questionable. As you pointed out, she doesn't give the originals; in a few cases, this is apparently because she made them up (the Parsley Bread comes to mind). Also, she makes substitutions and uses new-world ingredients without warning. Haslett, one of the few for which I was able to find the original, calls for almonds, dates, and raisins (don't have the recipe in front of me, unfortunately; there may be one or two more ingredients); Cosman's Haslett calls for these and also pears, filberts and dried pineapple rings (!!) Authenticity aside, other cooking buffs in my acquaintance have pointed out that Cosman's recipes are weird, and just don't taste good. Some SCA folk's aversion to medieval food can be traced to early exposure to Cosman recipes. Fab Feasts is a good source for feast illustrations and the like, but a better source for recipes is Pleyn Delit, by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler. The redacted recipes are tasty and easy to follow, and the editors print the original recipes and variants. Medieval cooking is fun and rewarding; I hope you'll give it a try soon. D.Peters (posting from SBloch's account) -- Stephen Bloch sbloch at s.ms.uky.edu Newsgroups: rec.org.sca From: marian at world.std.com (marian walke) Subject: Re: Fabulous Feasts (was: Re: veggie feasts) Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Thu, 7 Apr 1994 06:54:26 GMT For a long time I thought, well the recipes in FF are bogus, but at least there are all those great illustrations.... Then one day I started reading the small print next to the illos and realized some of THEM are bogus, too - attributed to a 19th C. forger! Really: Plein Delyte, Curye on Inglysch, etc - anything that gives you all the ORIGINAL recipes so that you can judge the reconstructions - these are the books to go with if you need other people's versions of Medieval cookery (and Dining with Will Shakespeare, if you can find it, for 16/17th C recipes). If you're willing to dispense with the reconstructions, Duke Cariodoc's cookbook collections are the best because they have more recipes in one volume than anyone else's. If you can't get those, try Falconwood Press, 1983 Colonic Street, Albany NY 12210-2501; they've put out quite a few (mostly 16th/17th C) cookery books (retyped from original publications, usually). They'll send you a catalogue if you send an SASE. --Old Marian (marian at world.std.com) From: sbloch at ms.uky.edu (Stephen Bloch) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Subject: Re: Fabulous Feasts (was: Re: veggie feasts) Date: 7 Apr 1994 11:24:47 -0400 Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences marian walke wrote: >For a long time I thought, well the recipes in FF are bogus, but at least >there are all those great illustrations.... I should say a word in defense of FF. There's an hypocras recipe that is paraphrased in either _Pleyn Delit_ or _To the King's Taste_ (I forget which) and printed in full in FF. There's also a lot of information about food and sanitation regulations; I'm not knowledgeable enough in that area to know whether it's sound. -- mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib Stephen Bloch sbloch at s.ms.uky.edu From: Philip & Susan Troy Date: Wed, 07 May 1997 19:05:51 -0400 Subject: Re: SC - "Fabulous Feasts" linneah at erols.com wrote: > I know everyone has bad things to say about the recipies in "Fabulous Feasts", > but how accurate is all that other information included in the book? You > know, like who ate what, how and why? I haven't had time to read the copy I > was given and I'd like to know if I should make the time or forget it and > donate it to a library. > > Linneah How odd it is to hear myself complimenting that book! I feel that most of what's in it is pretty good, except for the redactions, which aren't strictly speaking, redactions at all, since they bear so little resemblance to the recipes they are based on. Cosman has much useful information on how a SCAdian can eat a meal as a member of a medieval society, using medieval manners in a medieval world. An interesting perspective that we often forget. Now, about the frumenty made from Grape-Nuts, and whatever dish it was that was garnished with red liquorice whips... Adamantius From: Mark Schuldenfrei Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 11:16:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: SC - "Fabulous Feasts" I know everyone has bad things to say about the recipies in "Fabulous Feasts", but how accurate is all that other information included in the book? You know, like who ate what, how and why? I haven't had time to read the copy I was given and I'd like to know if I should make the time or forget it and donate it to a library. I feel it is all of a piece. Don't put it in a library... burn it. Then, burn the libraries copy.... (:-) I truly enjoyed the review of "A Buttock Of Beef", where the reviewer claimed it made Fabulous Feasts look good.... and it does. I wasn't sure until then that it was possible to write a worse book than Fabulous Feasts. To be sure: most people tell me that the recipes, if made, are delicious. But that's not what I am on about. One guys opinion. Tibor From: Stephen Bloch Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 22:24:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: SC - "Fabulous Feasts" > I truly enjoyed the review of "A Buttock Of Beef", where the reviewer > claimed it made Fabulous Feasts look good.... and it does. I wasn't sure > until then that it was possible to write a worse book than Fabulous Feasts. I bought _Take a Buttock of Beef_ for one reason: unlike _Fabulous Feasts_, it includes original recipes, so you can just shut your eyes at the facing-page redactions and learn something. I'm assuming, of course, that the "original recipes" are in fact reprinted accurately. mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib Stephen Bloch sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/ Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University P.S. Yes, _Fabulous Feasts_ includes at least one original recipe -- IIRC, a lengthy series of instructions for preparing hypocras which was omitted from _Pleyn Delit_ in the interest of brevity. From: Stephen Bloch Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 07:35:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SC - Re: Fabulous Feasts > So far as availability of other sources at the time is concerned, I am > reasonably sure that _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_ predates > _Fabulous Feasts_ by quite a bit. The EETS edition of _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_ is copyright 1888, reprinted 1964. _A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke_, which contains most or all of the same source, was published in a mass-market form (by Scribner's) in 1962. The latter gives most or all of the recipes in the same source, in Middle English without translation, redaction, or commentary, but with a moderately-accurate glossary in the back, and with with hand-drawn illustrations that will make even the average costume-ignorant SCAdian laugh. Lorna Sass's _To the King's Taste_ was originally printed in 1975, and is much better documented than _Fabulous Feasts_. Sass too makes some questionable substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients (many of which are easier to find now), but she documents each recipe individually and distinguishes clearly among the original recipe, her translation into modern English, and her redaction. But I had the same impression on reading _Fabulous Feasts_ as the original poster: there's a lot of information here, which seems to reach a low point in the actual recipes. Could anybody who's familiar with sumptuary laws, sanitation laws, and the other subjects Cosman touches on tell us how accurate those parts of the book are? mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib Stephen Bloch sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/ Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University From: Stephen Bloch Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 19:54:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: SC - _Fabulous Feasts_ > Note to Lord Ras: I did try (just out of twisted, morbid curiosity) > the recipe for "Fruytes Ryal Rice: Artichokes in Blueberry Rice"...it > was GHASTLY, so your comment cheered me up immensely - maybe it's not > me, maybe it's the recipe itself!! After a few years of SCA feasts and pot-lucks, you develop the ability to detect a Fabulous Feasts recipe, even if you haven't read that particular recipe. I think Cosman decided that medieval food gloried in contrasting or surprising flavors and colors, and therefore concluded that anything with contrasting or surprising flavors and colors was medieval food, even if many of the ingredients are native either to the New World or to the laboratories of General Foods. Almost every dish must combine sweet, fruity flavors with savory ones. There's a lot of fish, but mysteriously never served by itself with a simple sauce -- it requires fruit. Some of the more infamous recipes are the "artichokes in blueberry rice" you discovered, the "pears stuffed with lentils and cranberries", the "chicken stuffed with lentils, cherries, and cheese", the "salmon and fruit tart", and the parsley bread. The parsley bread differs from the rest in being actually fairly tasty, but since there is indeed (as Cosman says) a severe shortage of medieval bread recipes, it draws people's attention, and nobody else has been able to find a source for it. _Fabulous Feasts_ also includes a roux-based white sauce, dated precisely to 1357 Cesena, Italy (we ought to be able to pin down the source from that, wouldn't you think?), hundreds of years before any other roux-based sauce I've heard of. mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib Stephen Bloch sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/ Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 08:31:31 -0400 From: Philip & Susan Troy Subject: Re: SC - favorite sweet swbro at mail.telis.org wrote: > Speaking of Esther Aresty's _The Delctable Past_, I picked up a copy of it > at an auction this weekend. It looks like a survey type of book, has > anybody read it, and what do you think about it? As I recall it had two or three recipes that were immensely popular (and incidentally good food) and which were considered state-of-the-art in the SCA 25 or 30 years ago, when there were fewer primary source materials easily available. As with a lot of the older, less-used source materials, it lives in the buried-and-only-semi-accessible layer of my bookshelves, along with things like "Dining With William Shakespeare". I recall Aresty's adaptations of such period recipes as the Mustard Sops from Le Viandier de Taillevent, and an adapted eighteenth-century recipe for Richmond Maids of Honor doing double-duty for both the Georgian/Regency sweet and medieval darioles, even though they're pretty different. Aresty is also the source of the recent hubbub on this list regarding the Great Rosti Question. In general I'd say she represents state-of-the-art SCA cookery, also incidentally tasty food, from 30 years ago, which has been superceded by just as tasty food made through better research. As I've frequently said in the past, many of us unfairly revile books like "Fabulous Feasts", and the one discussed above, for their inadequacies, while at the time of their publication there wasn't a lot else available in the way of source materials for those who didn't want to deal with untranslated or unmodernized primary sources. There was no "Take a Thousand Eggs or More", no second edition of "Pleyn Delit". No first edition, in fact. Also, these books don't address the specific needs of SCAdians very well at all, but they weren't designed to. They were designed more for people to play at home with doing a medieval feast that was more about costume-party fun than about education. Authenticity wasn't considered important, and since it sold fewer books, why include it as a criterion? In any case, I have a soft spot in my heart for such books, and can't bear to get rid of them, but I rarely cook from them today. Adamantius Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 03:50:27 -0400 From: Alex Clark Subject: RE: [Sca-cooks] Book - The Medieval Kitchen To: Cooks within the SCA At 10:06 PM 10/17/2003 -0400, Elewyiss wrote: >Can I interperate this to mean you do not like Fabulous Feasts? Is there >a problem with the text? My recollection (from some years ago) is that there are problems with almost every recipe in _Fabulous Feasts_. Most of the recipes in this book are not attributed to any period source, and many of them look like heavily modified adaptations of period recipes, or substitutions, or outright new inventions. Though of course it's hard to prove this when you aren't told where these recipes are supposed to have come from. The only recipe that I remember as coming from a specific, identified, period source is mammenye bastarde. The quoted recipe seems to have many serious errors; in particular, several of the spices are said to be one pound each. By comparison with the other recipes from _Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books_ (Cariadoc's reprint, 1988) it seems very likely that the spice measurements were scribal errors, and that where the _Fabulous Feasts_ recipe calls for almonds the original called for amydon. If this is indeed (as I think I remember) the only recipe in FF to provide its source, then for interpretations of cited/quoted period recipes FF scores 0 out of 1. More generally, it seems to include more non-period (or at best implausible) recipes than almost any other book on period cooking that I've read, with the possible exception of _How to Cook Forsoothly_. Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 21:09:50 -0400 From: "Christine Seelye-King" Subject: [Sca-cooks] Fabulous Feasts. To: "Cooks within the SCA" This is very funny. I am saving it for posterity. However, I feel I have to put in at least one vote for nostalgic reasons. It was one of my first historical cookbooks, and there are a couple of recipes in there that I like, even if they aren't documentable. Mine has notes in the margins, has had art work copied out of it countless times, and has provided much good information. Yes, all of the previous comments are correct, no, I wouldn't recommend it now, but by golly, it was one of the few things we had in the early days, and I liked it! Ok, back to FF bashing, but it's such an easy target. Christianna off to cook a galantine pie and fry up some oranges.... I do not like Fabulous Feasts. I will not use it, Elewyiss. I will not use it to cook feasts. I will not use it to roast beasts. I will not use it at a war. I will not keep in my drawer. I will not use it for day board. I will not use it to feed the Horde. I will not keep it in my kitchen. I do not think that it is bitchin'. I will not use it for Iron Chef, Even if the chef's named Jeff. Its best use is as a weapon; Flung via catapault beyond Japan. I do not like Fabulous Feasts. I will not use it, Elewyiss. Dr. Huette Seuss From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] food on St Val's day To: Cooks within the SCA Also sprach Linda Anderson: > I don't know the author pilloried earlier but enjoyed the idea that > no one could figure out how "That accent came from Brooklyn" as > priceless. Ah. Back in the old days, when the SCA was a couple of groups on the West Coast of the US and a group in New York City shortly thereafter, one of the first things an East Coast SCAdian cook did was go to the bookshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and get a copy of "Fabulous Feasts". Well-meaning friends would award copies for birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc., because when people found out about your weird hobby, that was the only book they could find on the subject. People began to use stacks of "Fabulous Feasts" to hold up the coffee table with the broken leg. Made a good doorstop... It actually has a fair amount of good information on medieval eating habits, but the adaptations of period recipes are pretty dreadful, probably because the author didn't (and still doesn't, I'm told) actually know how to cook, and saw no need, since she was not specifically catering to the needs of reenactors, _not_ to go for a rather fanciful approach, one which posits that a drab-looking dish can be brightened up with a bit of color, so dressing it up with some shredded red licorice whip candy is an excellent idea. Never mind that a period cook would have solved this problem, if a problem were in fact perceived, in a totally different way. There are also some recipes, allegedly, made up out of whole cloth, as it were, with no foundation in any extant period recipe. New York City SCAdians (such as myself, for example) have more reason than those above to find the lady fairly silly: for years she helped run the annual Cloisters Medieval Faire (at the Cloisters, the series of relocated and reconstructed medieval European monasteries now owned and run by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in uptown Manhattan). She made herself fairly unpleasant to SCAdians trying to do demos at that fair, doing things like cancelling parking privileges for SCAdians at the last minute, so people had to park their cars about a mile from the fighters' lists and lug their armor in and out. And then there was the time she cancelled the SCA's entire demo one year about fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to begin, and decided to read from Chaucer with E.G. Marshall instead. She used to hold medieval feasts for various organizations, and trained her servers, as well as the diners, with the little speech I paraphrased in my earlier post, about eating with the manifold extensions to the hands, thah finnngaaaaaahhhs. She ingratiated herself especially to my lady wife, who, while enrolled in a class on Chaucer at the City College of New York, was told by Professor Cosman that nobody without an English heritage (my wife is of Chinese ancestry) could fully appreciate the subtlety of Chaucer's language, so taking her class would be a waste of everyone's time... her own heritage consisting of birth into, and growing up in, a Polish-speaking Jewish community in Brooklyn, where her grandfather's name (originally something like Pielzcsnewsky, later changed by a clerk at Ellis Island) had become Pellner. Currently, I understand she's made a fortune selling medical practices, starting with that of her husband, when he passed away, and expanding this into a sort of brokerage. And she really does talk funny... Adamantius Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 14:26:19 EDT From: Aldyth at aol.com Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] "Fabulous Feasts" To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org In a message dated 4/8/2007 12:13:07 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time, StefanliRous at austin.rr.com writes: <<< Actually the first half of "Fabulous Feasts", the section which talks about the history of various medieval foods and cooking isn't that bad. The problem is with the recipes in the second half, since many aren't that good, and no original recipes or attributions are given. So, it isn't a bad read, just don't use the second half of the book as good examples of medieval recipes. >>> I was gifted with this book at 12th night some 15 years ago. The person who did the "deed" was convinced it was a wonderful source for me to continue my cooking education. That said, I agree with Stefan. Although I did try St. Johns Rice from the recipe section. Once. That volume "disappeared" from my collection a few years ago. So I had to re buy it online. Just to have it and show my guild members how far we have come. Aldyth Edited by Mark S. Harris Fabulous-Fsts-msg Page 10 of 10