Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes

A Handbook for Historic Recipe Reconstruction and Cookbook Analysis: “A Hastiness of Cooks”

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?

Medieval cooking (Illustration: Courtney Nzeribe)

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.

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