Dear ANCIENT FOOD TECH members,

Those of you interested in Medieval food technology may be interested in two new papers concerning the cooking of foods in the Mediterranean.


In 2017 the writing system of a Medieval manuscript was revealed to be proto-Romance: i.e. the ancestor to the modern Romance languages. In addition, it is written with a proto-Italic alphabet. It is the only known document of this kind and therefore has considerable linguistic and historic importance.

Two papers have been issued, which explain the writing system and translate a number of excerpts as examples. They can be freely downloaded from the LingBuzz website.

  1.  Linguistic Missing Links: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737
  2.  Linguistically Dating and Locating MS408: http:<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808>//ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808>

The manuscript is highly illustrated with primitive drawings, which include many images of cooking devices now known as Ottoman or Turkish braziers. In effect, they were earthenware tagines mounted on earthenware stands, which contained charcoal as the fuel source and elevated the cooking vessel to a convenient height. In some cases the braziers were stacked in order to cook different foodstuffs separately.

Intriguingly, some of the braziers in the manuscript had funnel stands, as they were used above beach fumaroles, where natural geothermal heat cooked the food by convection. This is because the manuscript originated from the volcanic island of Ischia, where the beach fumaroles exist to this day.

Anyone interested in the development of cooking vessels and cooking techniques should find the papers, and the manuscript itself, very useful for their scholarly research.
Regards,
G. E. Cheshire.
University of Bristol.


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