Contents The manuscript contains recipes for things such as butter of
almond milk, roasted duck, a meat
pottage and a sweet-and-sour fish preparation. The manuscript is loosely organised and has no real system beyond a basic grouping of recipes for cooking birds,
blancmange, and fruits and flowers.
Purpose It has been suggested that the text was not intended as a cookbook for the layperson since the level of lay literacy at the time was still relatively low and distribution of manuscripts was a "patchy affair". Several alternative purposes for its creation have been proposed, including: serving as testimony to the author's culinary skill, presenting and influencing trends, securing the status of the chef as a professional, and serving as a tool for professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers) aspiring to raise their class status by learning about higher-class meals. The latter theory has been proposed in part due to the text's location in the Sloane collection of manuscripts, where it is placed in a selection of medical recipes described as "utilitarian".
Modern study The text is notable to both culinary historians and
linguists, containing several examples of unique recipes and vocabulary.
Historical interest Of historical interest, the work contains the only references to recipes such as
pyany (a poultry dish garnished with
peonies) and
heppee (a
rose-hip broth). The text was written in the time of
Geoffrey Chaucer and provides insight into the types of food Chaucer may have eaten and written about. As was the case with most late medieval cooking, the author did not associate colours with specific flavours, but he did occasionally use colour to denote contrasts in flavour. For example, one of the included fish recipes uses
saffron in part of the dish flavoured with sugar and ginger (giving that part a reddish, saffron colour), and leaves the remaining part of the dish white to denote that it is flavoured with sugar only.
Linguistic interest Of linguistic interest, it contains the only known references in fourteenth-century English texts to
cormorants and
finches. Additionally, it contains the only references to
woodcocks,
botores (
bittern),
pluuers (
plovers), and
teals in fourteenth-century English cookbooks, though all are found elsewhere in menus of that era. == See also ==