17. Cooking Up Something Good
Description
Happy Thanksgiving to my American listeners!
Because Thanksgiving is THE holiday where food takes center stage, I bet there’s more than a few of you out there reaching for a cookbook this week. Which is why The Book Owl went into research mode to discover the history of cookbooks.
From rotting meat to imaginary friends, it’s a recipe for concocting a great episode. And, there’s even a special guest who tried to take over the show.
Links Mentioned in this Episode….
- Support the show by shopping at Amazon using the Amazon Affiliate Link at https://thebookowlpodcast.com/support
- Trying out the world’s oldest recorded recipe from Yale News: https://news.yale.edu/2018/06/14/what-did-ancient-babylonians-eat-yale-harvard-team-tested-their-recipes
- Book Riot’s History of Cookbooks: https://bookriot.com/history-of-cookbooks/
- Naming My Babies – The Trilogy Has Titles: https://wp.me/p10s13-31o
- Cassie Black is No Longer Naked: https://wp.me/p10s13-31B
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Cooking Up Something Good (Rough Transcript)
Introduction:
Hey everyone, this is Tammie Painter and you’re listening to the Book Owl Podcast, the podcast where I entertain your inner book nerd with tales of quirky books and literary lore.
And let me offer up a very Happy Thanksgiving to my listeners in the U.S. I hope everyone is keeping their distance and that you’ve got a plan in place for all that leftover turkey.
Because Thanksgiving is a holiday all about food and especially food we don’t normally cook — seriously, at what other point in the year do you suddenly think, “OMG, I just HAVE to make cranberry sauce?” — I thought this would be an excellent time to explore a type of book many Americans will be cracking open this Thursday.
The Part Where I Ask You to Go Shopping
But before we start, just a quick reminder that you help keep this show running. I need to offer up a very belated thank you to LaVelle for being a continued sponsor of the show with her monthly gift.
Unless you’re feeling especially flush with money, there’s no need for you to be quite so generous, but I want to remind you that you can help the show out by doing nothing more than the normal shopping you plan to do on Amazon this holiday season.
Any time you feel the itch to purchase a pack of dog food, a new pair of yoga pants, or a book that you intend to give as a gift but end up keeping for yourself, before you start shopping please head to the book owl podcast dot com slash support and use the Amazon link on that page to do your shopping.
That’s an affiliate link and it does not cost you anything extra, but does earn me an itty bitty commission that really does add up.
What? Another Introduction? Fine…
Okay, enough of that. So, if you’re going to be in the kitchen this week, I bet at some point you’re going to be reaching for a cookbook of some sort. Which had me curious about the history of these most valuable kitchen tools.
Well, okay, the electric kettle that keeps me fueled with tea is the most valuable in my opinion, but you know, cookbooks, second most valuable.
The Oldest Cookbook…and Recipe Success
It turns out the oldest cookbook, or at least the oldest one that’s been discovered, dates from 1700 BCE and has no pages. Wait, let me clarify. It’s actually a collection of a handful of recipes on a series of four clay tablets that are part of what’s known as the Yale Tablets.
And no, they weren’t unearthed in Yale, they’re called that because they’re housed in the Yale Peabody Museum as part of the Yale Babylonian Collection. Lot of Yales going on there.
Anyway, the main recipe on these tablets is a meat stew that contains meat, obviously, vinegar, and herbs, and is said to resemble a stew that was so adored by kings, it ended up being written about in stories for over 300 years.
And just like finding an interesting recipe in a magazine, some researcher said, “Hey, let’s give this a try.” So in 2018, a few brave folks from New York University recreated the stew as best they could with modern equivalents of the ingredients.
The result? Turns out it was pretty darn tasty. And I’ll include a link to their experiment in the show notes.
Cooking Up Food Poisoning In Ancient Rome
So moving up about 1800 years, we get to the first century CE and we find the earliest European cookbook, the De re coquinaria. And I’m no Latin scholar, but I think that translates to from the king’s kitchen. An if there is a Latin scholar to there, please let me know if that’s right or wrong.
Anyway, this book was supposedly compiled by the Roman Marcus Gavius Apicius, and he was the celebrity gourmand of the day. And he and his book were so influential, any collection of recipes came to be known as an Apicius for decades to come.
Now, in Ancient Rome the goal of cooking, what chefs gained fame for was being able to take your main food item and flavoring it and covering it up so much you could not tell what you were eating.
This wasn’t because Romans loved eating the Surprise du Jour. It was because, well, how do I put this? They didn’t exactly have refrigerators and they weren’t exactly bringing in fresh meat every day.
And I really hope this isn’t familiar to you, especially today, but the cooks had to do everything they could to hide the taste of the rotting meat they were serving up. Yum.
Chinese Cookery Classic
Stepping away from Europe for just a bit and jumping forward again in time (I know, you haven’t travelled this much in months, have you?). We’re popping over to China where there are reports of cookbooks dating all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, which was extended from the years 600 to 900, but some pesky person lost it. Or maybe spilled soy sauce all over it.
Either way, the earliest surviving Chinese cookbook dates from about 1330, and I’m not going to attempt the Chinese name for the book, but in English it translates to the name Important Principles of Food and Drink. And I really hope the recipes inside weren’t as bland as that title.
Germans Love Their Cookbooks
Okay, zipping back over to Europe, we find medieval Germans really liked to cook. Or at least they really liked cookbooks, because it’s here we find the most cookery manuscripts. These include Das buch von guten spise, or the Book of Good Food from 1350.
And probably no surprise, but the Germans were also the first to employ our friend the printing press to publish a cookbook in 1485, with the name Kuchenmeysterey, or Kitchen Mastery. Which has a rather modern marketing ring to it.
A Cookbook for the Average Householder
Again, no surprise, but the French also had a few cookbooks on their shelves. And like most of the other cookbooks I’m talking about from this time period, these were all intended for chefs who were cooking for the highest levels of society, including the king. For example, the earliest French cookbook we have was written in the 14th century by Guillaume Tirel, the master chef for not one, but two French kings.
But we have a little rebel in France, and as far as I could tell, this might be the earliest cookbook written for common people, or rather for wome