[HN Gopher] Search through historical cookbooks dating back to t...
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Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Middle Ages
Author : stiray
Score : 89 points
Date : 2023-02-16 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thesifter.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (thesifter.org)
| xwdv wrote:
| Useless if you're expecting to find ancient recipes
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Wrong expectations lead to uselessness
| vixen99 wrote:
| Given "Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the
| Middle Age", one might be forgiven for expecting to find the
| odd recipe.
| jghn wrote:
| Even in the best scenario, recipes back then weren't like
| recipes now. A modern cook would find them useless as well,
| they left quite a bit up to assumed knowledge & experience.
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| I searched for beef, went through the list of results trying to
| find a recipe. I eventually got a link to a scanned google book
| called "Biscuits and Dried Beef, a Panacea" but then I started
| reading it and the first page had a quote from poetry. "Cool,
| these 1800 cookbooks were so well read", but then as I continued
| it turned out to be a pleasant fictional work on the life of a
| poor young Episcopalian Priest with a young family. Nice find but
| seems like there's a lot of noise in this.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| You found the old version of modern recipe sites.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Very useful. I searched for "pasta" and almost nothing showed up
| but I think I am not yet very good at using the tool. Anyway it's
| very interesting to have a database of some old text about
| cooking to search.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >First attested in English in 1874, the word pasta comes from
| Italian pasta,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta
|
| Evidently it is a young word relatively speaking.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Pasta and its cognates is a real ball of culinary-taxonomic mud
| so that's a pretty unlucky first choice I think.
|
| The word pasta and etymological relatives are also the words
| for all dough, sausage (pate), porridge, pastry (patisserie),
| pesto, etc etc in different european cuisines and that's just
| what I know off the top of my head, in use in the last few
| decades. If you expand it out a couple hundred years who
| fucking knows what will have been known by that word or its
| variants.
|
| I'm not even sure how long that usage dates in english either.
| Even as recently as mid-late 20th century american cookbooks
| referred to all noodles as macaroni and used that word
| generically the same way we use pasta now.
| perihelions wrote:
| I think pesto doesn't belong there: it comes from a different
| Latin word that seems unrelated.
|
| - _" From Latin pistus ("crushed, pounded"), from Latin pinso
| ("to pound, beat, crush"), whose frequentative also gave
| Italian pestare ("to pound")._"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pesto#Italian
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Latin
| dom96 wrote:
| I just tried "chicken", lots of stuff came up
| dom96 wrote:
| There are some really amazing books in here. Like this one from
| 1390 written in Old English
| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433078975988&vi...
|
| Might give cooking a few of these a try
| macintux wrote:
| Nitpick: that's definitely not Old English, which is mostly
| incomprehensible to most readers today. That's Middle English.
|
| Here's an example of Old English.
| https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...
| dom96 wrote:
| Ahh! Thanks for the correction
| jdmtheNth wrote:
| Interesting, but not useful.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| no recipes tho, only metadata
| stiray wrote:
| Not necessary, depends on the source, for instance I got this
| one: https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/12114/7
|
| (when you trigger the search or view the Works table, the links
| are in last column)
|
| But it does help if you know the language... :D
| tokai wrote:
| For those that find this unuseful. Most of the works in the base
| has been digitized by google and others. Just look up any title
| you're interested in and you'll find the work.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I can see the complaints even then:
|
| "Useless cookbook! My local grocer has never heard of Silphium"
| danielvaughn wrote:
| If I ever become fantastically wealthy, one thing I'd love to do
| is build a culinary museum. Imagine rotating exhibits where you
| can taste-test food from hundreds of years ago (or at least a
| close approximation).
| meee wrote:
| City Tavern in Philadelphia serves food made from 18th century
| recipes, using the tools available at that time. The prices are
| in line with typical casual dining (Applebees for example).
| It's fun if you are in the area but some recipes have improved
| in the meantime. IMHO, creme brulee benefitted from the
| appropriation of the butane torch (I think City Tavern uses an
| iron).
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Compared to some of these, it is not very old, but I regularly
| use a German cookbook from the 1800s. It was specifically crafted
| for young women learning to organize a household and contains
| detailed instructions about every necessary step to take.
|
| The other big advantage is that it almost entirely relies on
| local ingredients, so it is very cheap to cook, as long as you
| reduce the amounts suggested for butter and eggs.
| f001 wrote:
| What book is this? I'd be interested in adding it to my
| collection.
| voytec wrote:
| There is a blog called Rare Cooking, which digs out old recipes,
| like John Locke's recipe for Pancakes[1].
|
| [1] https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-
| pa...
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(page generated 2023-02-16 23:01 UTC)