Utilis Coquinario is an English cookery book written in Middle English at the turn of the fourteenth century.^[1] The title has been translated as "Useful for the Kitchen".^[2] The text is contained in the Hans Sloane collection of manuscripts in the British Library and is numbered Sloane MS 468.^[3][4]

Author[edit]

The author's name is unknown. It has been theorised that he was "the high-ranking chef of a large kitchen", though not one as large as that of Richard II (for example, compare this text to The Forme of Cury).^[5] It is accordingly assumed that he was a man.^[6][a] The resemblance of some of the author's recipes to early French recipes indicates the author may have had a reading knowledge of Middle French.^[6] The author's references to "fyssh day" and Lent indicate that the author cooked for a Christian household.^[7]

Text[edit]

Contents[edit]

The manuscript contains recipes for things such as butter of almond milk,^[8] roasted duck,^[9] a meat pottage^[10] and a sweet-and-sour fish preparation.^[11][12] The manuscript is loosely organised and has no real system beyond a basic grouping of recipes for cooking birds, blancmange, and fruits and flowers.^[2][6]

Purpose[edit]

It has been suggested that the text was not intended as a cookbook for the layperson since the level of lay literacy at the time was still relatively low and distribution of manuscripts was a "patchy affair".^[13] Several alternative purposes for its creation have been proposed, including: serving as testimony to the author's culinary skill,^[13] presenting and influencing trends,^[13] securing the status of the chef as a professional,^[13] and serving as a tool for professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers) aspiring to raise their class status by learning about higher-class meals.^[14] The latter theory has been proposed in part due to the text's location in the Sloane collection of manuscripts, where it is placed in a selection of medical recipes described as "utilitarian".^[15]

Modern study[edit]

The text is notable to both culinary historians and linguists, containing several examples of unique recipes and vocabulary.

Historical interest[edit]

Of historical interest, the work contains the only references to recipes such as pyany (a poultry dish garnished with peonies) and heppee (a rose-hip broth).^[13] The text was written in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer and provides insight into the types of food Chaucer may have eaten and written about.^[16] As was the case with most late medieval cooking, the author did not associate colours with specific flavours, but he did occasionally use colour to denote contrasts in flavour.^[17] For example, one of the included fish recipes uses saffron in part of the dish flavoured with sugar and ginger (giving that part a reddish, saffron colour), and leaves the remaining part of the dish white to denote that it is flavoured with sugar only.^[17]

Linguistic interest[edit]

Of linguistic interest, it contains the only known references in fourteenth-century English texts to cormorants and finches.^[13] Additionally, it contains the only references to woodcocks, botores (bittern), pluuers (plovers), and teals in fourteenth-century English cookbooks, though all are found elsewhere in menus of that era.^[13]

See also[edit]

• British Library Foundation Collections
• Cookbook § History

Footnotes[edit]

Citations[edit]

Bibliography[edit]