Did you know that you can cook from hundreds of historic cookbooks without spending a lot of money, except perhaps for your monthly internet fee? Or maybe even for free, if you use the computers at a public library?
There are vast digital collections of historic cookbooks and manuscripts just waiting for you to use. See Online Cookbooks: Sources for an example of the wealth available to you.
Many stumbling blocks – archaic language, obtuse instructions, etc. – keep a lot of dedicated cooks, novelists, historic reenactors, researchers, and others from using these resources for cooking or research.
Now there’s a tool that will help you in deciphering the archaic language and obtuse instructions you’ll often find in these books.
“A Hastiness of Cooks”: A Practical Handbook for Use in Deciphering the Mysteries of Historic Recipes and Cookbooks, For Living-History Reenactors, Historians, Writers, Chefs, Archaeologists, and, of Course, Cooks, is now available in both paperback and Kindle format. You’ll find both listed on Amazon’s UK, German, French, and US sites.
With “A Hastiness of Cooks”, you’ll possess a key to a door that – once opened – will lead you into an unending garden of delights, filled not with flowers, but with the words and wisdom of cooks and writers and cultures long gone.
Please share the news with friends and colleagues.
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN 
Thank you so much for your comments – I’ve had a family emergency and am just now getting back to the website.
Thank you so much for this info. I feel that it really will be a key and help me a lot.
This sounds like a good one, I had to do some of this when working on my seafood cookbook. I tried to keep the recipes intact but had to include some footnotes and edit some of the extinct characters like “thorn”. This would certainly come in handy.
Thanks! I hope you like the book. Let me know what you think.
I am so excited about this book! I love historic cooking and though I read and research info on how to interpret old recipes, it’s not always simple nor is it a one-for-one swap out on items, especially looking for modern equivalents for items that no longer exist (and sometimes for good reason! ).