sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 7/8

Bruno Laurioux / Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (eds.): The Recipe from the XIIth to the XVIIth Centuries

This volume focuses on a genre of medieval writing, today (in English from the eighteenth century, and in other European languages from slightly earlier) known as a recipe, that is a formal prescription, a Latin imperative, as my physician used to write at the beginning of his instructions to a pharmacist. What were known as recepta - and their vernacular equivalents - survive from the medieval world in their thousands, for a range of purposes far beyond medicine, most commonly in cookery, but also alchemy, metallurgy, colours, cosmetics and magic. The essays here come from different cultural contexts, even if predominantly from Western Europe and its links with scholars of the Islamic world of the first millennium CE. They have their genesis in a conference held under the auspices of the International Union of Academies, of which Professor Paravicini Bagliani is honorary president, and a project codirected by Professor Laurioux on Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages (CoReMA -https://corema.hypotheses.org).

Between introduction and conclusion, there are 26 essays, arranged in four groups. There are rich pickings, bonnes bouches of many descriptions, that help us understand the transmission of practical knowledge - experimenta - and see its development and reach. What in terms of cooking commenced as short notes, sometimes recipes of 20 to 30 words in the thirteenth century, these sprawled, in one case in the late fourteenth-century Mesnagier de Paris, to more than 900. Behind this elaboration lie important developments - precision in practical matters; in measurement, of quantities, of time, of heat; observations, such as change of colour, of taste; and in guidance of how to make these changes, which are desirable, and which not. These pragmatics have had important long-term consequences, for they are what would develop into scientific method in one cultural arena, and, in another, into cuisine and other forms of the arts.

There are paradoxes here. Many, if not most, cookery books - and indeed, collections of recipes for other purposes - do not appear to have been near a kitchen (or equivalent), and it may well be too that the language in which they have been preserved is not that which practitioners of the art will have predominantly used. The preservation of practical knowledge has taken place in a context potentially different from that in which it was developed and applied. Although recipes are prescriptive injunctions, which can only have been prepared by those with practical knowledge, their recording, transmission and use are less likely to have been first-hand. The essays in the book take us through some of the stages and influences that lie behind them and reveal much in the process.

The section on 'Writing and reading the recipe' begins with Marianne Brisville's essay on measure and measures in Western Islamic cookery books of the Middle Ages, considering the relationship of the recipe to the balance of temperament in the individual; Limor Yungman reviews forms of medieval culinary recipe poems in Arabic, a crucial context in the transmission of knowledge, from a form that can easily be remembered (i.e. oral) to something that is written and adapted culturally in the process; Antonella Campanini investigates culinary recipes and their readership in the Italian renaissance, examining who writes recipes and for whom, and how recipe books might come to be considered as instructional materials for the art of cookery; Ryan Whibbs looks at the acquisition of skill in a pragmatic context, the apprenticeship of cooks, charcutiers and caterers in Paris in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and Gianenrico Bernasconi investigates a further element of pragmatics, measuring time in seventeenth-century cook-books, and how that practice might supersede some elements of experience, for example where it was no longer practical to observe colour change, in oven-cooked food.

The second section, the 'Boundaries of a genre', turns in the first essay to Charles Burnett and Liana Saif's revelation of the role of recipes in Arabic magical texts, and the culinary recipe as the basis of their form, albeit softening stone and trapping animals are entirely different processes to cookery; Sébastien Moureau's concern are Arabic and Arab-Latin alchemical texts, working towards the definition and classification of different types of alchemical recipe. Bruno Laurioux's chapter homes in on the texts of Renaissance books of secrets and the different traditions of culinary recipes, in terms of context, reader and practitioner. Wanesa Asfora Nadler's interest has been piqued by Marsilio Ficino's Consilio contro la pestilentia, written against the background of plague in Florence in 1478-80; here, culinary recipes rub shoulders with medical ones, and the boundaries between the two are often opaque.

Federica and Pietro Baraldi look at a manuscript miscellany of recipes from the second half of the sixteenth century, with some 1200 recipes, of which only a fifth are culinary - as a compendium of practical knowledge, against the context of the Este court in Ferrara. Rafał Hryszko engages with fifteenth-century Italian confectionery and Wendy Pfeffer with Jean Bruyérin-Champiers' De re cibaria, important for understanding sixteenth-century French food - both essays that show the significance of printing and publication to the transmission of knowledge. In the last essay in this group, Francesa Pucci Donata highlights a fifteenth-century manuscript from Ravenna, which includes other pragmatic matters beyond cookery - its references lie in both cook-books and books of secrets, and details show the copyist/compiler not to have been a specialist in cookery and the book likely to have been addressed to amateurs.

The third section, on 'Identity and the recipe', offers contributions from Françoise Sabban on the concept of the recipe in Ancient China, with recipes recovered from archaeological sites; from Hélène Jawhara Piñer, who examines origins of braided breads in Andalusian Arabic recipes of the thirteenth century and those for challah bread, arguing that the latter is of Sephardic origin rather than Ashkenazi. Yann Morel discusses the cook identified here as Hotin Mautaillie, whom he links to the household of Charles the Bold and the culinary practices of the Burgundian court. Barbara Denicolò follows references to place in recipes written in German in the sixteenth century, to track links to region and references to forms of the territorial in culinary identity, and in a second essay focuses on stockfish as a regional speciality, with reference to the Tyrol, from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. Marlene Ernst follows a similar theme, the international 'designation' of dishes, its relation to ingredients and social rank in German works.

'Recipe and practice' brings together Mieille Ausècache's contribution on Salernitan recipes, and how they engaged pragmatically with medical theory and foodstuffs; Madeleine Ferrières on a recipe from the French translation of Platina by Didier Christol, who is largely unknown but who was connected to the medical school of Montpellier and who in this instance elaborates the recipe. Here also are Julien Véronèse's essay on experimenta and one of the premier manuscripts on the conjuration of spirits; Isabella Gagliardi on the Jesuits, their recipes and the distillation of aquavit; Tillmann Taape on preparing a digital critical edition of a late sixteenth-century manuscript by an author from Toulouse, prominent for its range of recipes, magic and craft connections; Iolanda Ventura on Pseudo-Mesue's Antidotarium, and its pharmaceutical background; and last, but far from least, Michael Pastoureau on recipes for making colours and the crucial question of the connection between the theoretical and the practical; as he puts it, writing recipes is one thing, painting quite another.

This is a stimulating volume, broad in its content and imagination. It deserves to be widely read, both for its intrinsic context, and for the way in which it approaches a class of medieval text.