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New Titles from Prospect Books - December 2003

Report by Barbara Santich

One of the most important books of 2003 for food historians is Gilly Lehmann's The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. This is a mammoth work, nearly 400 pages of text, 77 pages of appendix, 24 pages of bibliography, and covers, comprehensively and in detail, not only cookery books (authors and readers) of the eighteenth century but also meals, mealtimes and dining rules. (ISBN 0-903018-04-8)

Among the recent facsimile editions from Prospect Books is The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected by William Rabisha (1661), described as "a remarkable statement of the art of cookery as it was in the 1660s". If you want to know how to "fry a dish of Maids", make a "Phraise of Cockles" or "Chewits of Salmon", this is your book. Rabisha was a contemporary of the French cook La Varenne, whose book Le Cuisinier François was published in 1651. (ISBN 1-903018-11-0)

Another seventeenth-century book, also published in facsimile, is William Lawson's A New Orchard and Garden with The Country Housewife's Garden, first published in 1618. Lawson was a clergyman but also a keen gardener, and in this book he wrote from experience, giving advice on grafting and pruning, designs for garden beds, and the growing and uses of herbs (saffron, he said, expels disease from the heart and the stomach). This edition includes an introduction by agricultural and gardening historian Malcolm Thick. (ISBN 1-903018-10-2)

Roman Food Poems, a modern translation by Alistair Elliot, contains some familiar texts, from Juvenal and Petronius, for example, but also some lesser known ones, such as an extract from de Rerum Natura by Lucretius describing the physics of taste.

        First we feel the juice inside our mouths
        (And that's the taste) when we compress our food
        By chewing - like a sponge that's full of water
        Being crushed in someone's hand to make it dry.

With Latin and English texts on facing pages, the book is useful to anyone learning Latin as well as food scholars. (ISBN1-903018-25-0)

From Southover Press comes The Boke of Keruynge by Wynkyn de Worde with an extensive introduction by food historian Peter Brears, who has not only studied English food history but also cooked and served many authentic meals. The Boke of Keruynge, more easily pronounced as The Book of Carving, is famous for its unparalleled collection of carving terms, such as "dysmembre that heron, displaye that crane, disfygure that pecocke," but also contains a good deal of information on late medieval manners and rituals. This reprint includes a facsimile of the original text (first published in 1508), plus a modern interpretation, and is available from Books for Cooks, Fitzroy, Victoria; shop@booksforcooks.com.au.

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