Date
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In this month's meeting we will be exploring the theme of recipes, food and cookery:
The earliest English culinary recipes, and other dietary advice in the Old English medical collections
Debby Banham: Affiliated lecturer, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic University of Cambridge, Director of Studies, Murray Edwards College
Banham will discuss a paper she is currently writing on the diet and medicine in the early middle ages. Culinary recipes are almost non-existent for the period, but she is currently working on a paper on those that do appear in medical collections:
When Faith Wallis and Giles Gasper published the *salsamenta pictaviensia* (‘sauces from Poitou’) from Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College manuscript Δ. 3.6 (Durham, twelfth century), there was much excitement about these being the ‘earliest English culinary recipes’.
They are indeed the earliest discrete block of culinary recipes yet found in a manuscript from England, but they are by no means the earliest culinary recipes *per se*, as a number are found in the vernacular medical collections compiled in England before the Norman Conquest. Like the Durham *salsamenta*, these are prescriptive rather than descriptive, that is, they do not tell us what people were eating at the time, but what the medical authorities of the time thought people ought to eat.
This paper will present these earlier recipes in the context of other contemporary dietary advice from medical collections, and investigate how food and drink were believed to contribute to health in early medieval England. It is clear that there was no general concept of ‘healthy eating’ in the modern sense, rather each recipe was intended to contribute to the treatment or management of a particular condition.
But it is possible to detect general principles behind them, and it will be of particular interest, from the point of view of intellectual history, to consider to what extent these are influenced by what is broadly understood as ‘humoral theory’.
Cooking recipes as part of the medieval medical tradition of the Middle Ages
Helmut W. Klug, Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung - Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities:
Klug co-manages a similar group with a focus on medieval German knowledge and practical texts in relation to medieval culinary history. He has been researching medieval cooking recipes since 2006, focussing particularly on Early New High German cooking recipes. 
Medieval cooking recipes are strongly related to medieval medical theory. Medieval chefs can easily be regarded as members of the medical profession - and at the beginning of Modern Times they start living this role. The presentation will provide a short introduction to the medical background of cooking recipes and outline the role model of a medieval chef. The portraits are based on Early New High German cooking recipe collections. These will be presented in an overview on the tradition context of handwritten recipe collections before 1500. These findings will be aligned with other vernacular medieval cooking recipe collections.