“Now arts of cookery will I preach, / How some meat shall seem raw I teach.”
The 'Liber Cure Cocorum' is a 15th-century English cookbook. Of the author, we only know that (s)he comes from the county of Lancashire. This is proven also by the language of the text, written in archaic English, with inflections typical of the northern English dialect of the 15th century.
It is a “cookbook in verse”. The author in fact did not use prose, preferring rhyme. Some say that it could be because rhyming verses are easier to memorise and therefore quicker to learn.
Yet, using verses also means smoothing the text out, playing with words, sacrificing something. As a result, a rhyming recipe book will not provide the same information as a normal recipe book, and this means sometimes that the understanding of the recipe is less easy.
Was it intended for a public of cooks who know their trade and can interpret cookbooks of a different kind? Certainly, it is not a book for beginners.
Well, the book is all yours to read, and the recipes to be made.
The challenge is open!
Happy reading!
or download it in PDF, MOBI or EPUBDownloads:
Richard Morris - Liber cure cocorum.pdf
Richard Morris - Liber cure cocorum.mobi
Richard Morris - Liber cure cocorum.epub
