THE THIRD FIFTEENTH-CENTURY COOKERY BOOK: A NEWLY IDENTIFIED GROUP WITHIN A FAMILY

In a discussion of what I identify as the 'family' groupings of medieval English culinary collections,1 I indicated that traits which identify recipes as coming from the same collection are their similar, or identical, wording and 'the way in which they occur in the same order - or, sometimes, roughly the same order as groups' (p. 17). One of the 'families' I identified was the group edited by Thomas Austin in the EETS Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books,2 consisting of London, British Library, MSS Harley 279 and Harley 4016, collated with, respectively, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Ashmole 1439 and Douce 55.Austin's 'two' cookery bookdsHarley 279 and Ashmole 1439 are very closely parallel, sharing much the same division titles and containing most of the same recipes in the same order. That is, under the heading 'Potage' (Harley 279's 'Potages dyvers'), Ashmole 1439 gives 152 of Harley 279's 153 recipes; under the next heading, 'Leche Viaunde', appear all sixty-four of Harley 279's recipes under that heading, and under 'Viaundes Furnes' are thirty-three of Harley 279's forty-four 'Dyverse Bake Metis' - the Ashmole scribe was apparently working from an exemplar which was missing a sheet here. To these three headings, Ashmole adds a fourth, 'Sauces pur diverse viaundes', containing the nineteen sauce recipes Austin printed in a separate section of his edition; most of these sauces appear in Harley 4016, not Harley 279. Aside from this addition, Harley 279 and Ashmole 1435 are one and the same 'cookery book'.Harley 4016, on the other hand, is not the same collection, but it is of the same 'family' because it contains many of the same recipes, about half the recipes of Harley 279 making up about half of the contents of Harley 4016. For example, Harley 279's recipe for 'Vele, kede, or henne in Bokenade', p. 13, xxxvj, reads:Both of these recipes are followed by an alternative recipe for the same dish, 279's 'Autre Vele en bokenade' and 4016's 'Auter maner buknade', but these are entirely different recipes, with different wording and strikingly different ingredients. Harley 279's reads:MS 4016 gives an equally long but somewhat simpler recipe, obviously not an elaboration of the earlier recipe:Take rawe Almondes, and blanche hem, and grynde hem, and draw hem thorgh a streynour with fresh broth and wyne into good stiff mylke; And then take veel, kyde, or hen, and parboile hem in fressh brothe, and pike hem clene, and cast him thereto; take Clowes, maces, and herbes, and lete hem boile ynowe; And then caste a litull Sugur, pouder ginger, and salt, and serue him forth.About all this has in common with the Harley 279 recipe is that both thicken with almond milk rather than the egg yolks called for in the previous recipe.The order of recipes in Harley 279 and 4016 is quite different. Unlike Harley 279 and Ashmole 1439, Harley 4016 has no subdivisions, and there is no perceptible rationale for its arrangement. An initial small group of pottages and stews is followed by fritters, pies, and tarts; a group of sauces follows, then directions for roasting various birds. Next we get various directions for roasting and stewing meats, followed by miscellaneous recipes: some fairly elaborate meat-based dishes such as 'Blamanger' and 'Gely' interspersed with eggs, shellfish, crepes, more fritters, and a lot more, including some for vegetables and fruits. Finally there is a sizeable group of fish recipes and, at the end, two more recipes for sweet dishes.Austin was, then, quite correct in considering Harley 4016 to be a separate cookbook, despite the considerable overlap of its contents with 279. But the manuscript he used to collate it with, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 55, is, like Harley 279, only a partial parallel. Most of the recipes in Douce 55 are parallel to recipes in Harley 4016, but by no means all, and the order of the recipes in Douce 55 is entirely different from that in Harley 4016, which, as noted above, has no discernible rationale. …

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