When a newspaper puts its most glaring error in the headline, it sucks you right in, doesn’t it?
Despite the article title — Porpoise porridge, sir? World’s oldest recipe book reveals dishes English kings enjoyed 600 years ago (Daily Mail) — the fact of the matter is, it’s nowhere near the oldest recipe-book. (Apicius is older by about a millennium.) The Forme of Curye is the oldest recipe-book in the English language — at least, the oldest English-language cookbook that I can think of off the top of my head.
Oddly, the Daily Mail article never does get around to providing the URL for the project, anyway; so if you’d like to see what it is they’re talking about, go to The John Rylands University Library Medieval Collection. (The text of this particular cookbook is also available through Project Gutenberg and also Greg Lindahl’s website; it’s also available in a few print editions
4 users commented in " The oldest what? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackTouché! And about the Mail’s usual standard of work, too. I have just drafted a post about journalism on the Middle Ages good and bad, and now I’ve stuck a link to this post in at the end as a supplement. Thanks!
This is the part where I roll my eyes and think “it’s the Mail, what did I expect?”
It was interesting to learn that one can still catch porpoises off Cornwall, however.
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