The Forme of Cury

Template:Template otherTemplate:Wikidata image The Forme of Cury (The Method of Cooking, from Old French , "cookery") is an extensive 14th-century collection of medieval English recipes. Although the original manuscript is lost, the text appears in nine manuscripts, the most famous in the form of a scroll with a headnote citing it as the work of "the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II". The name The Forme of Cury is generally used for the family of recipes rather than any single manuscript text. It is among the oldest extant English cookery books, and the earliest known to mention olive oil, gourds, and spices such as mace and cloves. The book also includes the earliest known recipe for macaroni and cheese.

The book has notable influences from the cuisine of several different countries. The book's relatively few vegetable and salad recipes indicate influence from the era's Spanish cuisine and Portuguese cuisine. The book's pasta recipes are clearly influenced from the era's Italian cuisine. A number of the book's recipes and the syrup cooking techniques are based on the era's Arabic cuisine. They were probably derived from Sicily, where the culture still had Arabic influences.

Context

The collection was named The Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge, who published an edition of one of the manuscripts in 1780 for a trustee of the British Museum, Gustavus Brander. It is one of the best-known medieval guides to cooking. The Forme of Cury may have been written partly to compete with Le Viandier of Taillevent, a French cookery book created at about the same time. This supports the idea that banquets were a symbol of power and prestige for medieval lords and kings.

Approach

In the preamble, the authors explain that the recipes are meant to teach a cook how to make common dishes and unusual or extravagant banquet dishes. They also note that the recipes were written with the advice of the best experts in medicine and philosophy.

The Forme of Cury is the first known English cookery book to mention some ingredients such as cloves, olive oil, mace and gourds. Many recipes contain what were then rare and valuable spices, such as nutmeg, ginger, pepper, cinnamon and cardamom. In addition to imparting flavour, many of the spices called for were included specifically to impart rich colouring to the finished dishes for the purpose of, as Pegge says, "gratifying the sight". There is a particular emphasis on yellows, reds and greens, but gilding and silvering were also used in several of the recipes. Yellow was achieved with saffron or egg yolk, red with "sanders" (sandalwood) or alkanet, and green often with minced parsley. There are recipes for preparing many types of animal meat, including whale, crane, curlew, heron, seal and porpoise. There are about ten vegetable recipes, including one for a vinaigrette salad, which indicates influence from Portugal and Spain, as French cooks rarely used vegetables at that time. There are also several pasta dishes, evidence of Italian influence.

Some recipes in The Forme of Cury appear to have been influenced by the Liber de Coquina, which had contributions from Arabic cuisine. For example, the recipe for (see illustration) corresponds to the Arabic (a rich semolina pudding). The confectionery-like confirms the connection with Sicily (which had been Arab, Catalan and Norman), as it uses the Arab technique of cooking in soft ball syrup.

Sample recipes

File:Forme of Cury title page.png

Title page of Samuel Pegge's 1780 version, the first printed edition

Sawse madame

In modern English:

Sauce Madame. Take sage, parsley, hyssop and savory, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes, and stuff the geese with them, and sew the hole so that no dripping comes out, and roast them well and keep the dripping that falls from them. Take the gelatin and dripping and place in a cooking-pot. When the geese are roasted enough, take them off and chop them in pieces, and take what is within and put it in a cooking-pot and put in wine if it is too thick. Add to it powder of galangal, powder-douce and salt, and boil the sauce and dress the geese in dishes and lay the sauce on.

Makerouns

The Forme of Cury contains a cheese and pasta casserole known as makerouns, the earliest recipe for what is now known as macaroni and cheese. It was made with fresh, hand-cut pasta which was sandwiched between a mixture of melted butter and cheese. The recipe given (in Middle English) was:

In modern English:

Make a thin sheet of dough and cut it in pieces. Place them in boiling water and boil them well. Take cheese and grate it and add it and place butter beneath and above as with losyns [a dish similar to lasagne], and serve.

Modern recreations

The Café at the Rylands, in Manchester's John Rylands Library where the manuscript is kept, cooked Tart in Ymber Day, Compast, Payn Puff, Frumenty and Gingerbrede, accompanied by Piment (spiced wine), for invited guests in 2009.

See also

• Apicius – a collection of Roman cookery recipes
• Liber de Coquina – 14th-century cookbook of Italian and French origin
• Utilis Coquinario – another 14th-century Middle English cookbook
• Le Viandier – 14th-century French cookbook

Bibliography

• (modern critical edition)

External links

• British Library, Add. MS 5016, a 15th-century copy of The Forme of Cury in scroll format.
• John Rylands Library, English MS 7; (index to the images)Template:Gutenberg, an 18th-century edition (page images)
• Text and links at the Foods of England project
• Pygg in sawse sawge (British Library)