Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Rhyming Recipes: The Curious Case of the Liber Cure Cocorum
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Florence Swan [+]
Description
In this paper I examine the Liber Cure Cocorum. This fifteenth-century anonymous culinary recipe collection contains approximately 137 recipes and is found within a courtesy book, The Booke of Curtassye, in British Library MS Sloane 1986 alongside medical, behaviour, and household texts. From this brief description the collection appears quite standard – many medieval culinary collections are anonymous, are found alongside household and behaviour texts (Le Ménagier de’ Paris), and the Liber’s length is similar to other collections (The Forme of Cury and Ordinance of Pottage). Yet the Liber has been traditionally distinguished from the corpus of Middle English culinary recipe collections because of an unusual feature: it is in rhyming verse. Magdalena Bator recently applied linguistic analysis to the collection’s recipes, concluding that the collection was for use neither by a professional cook nor a trainee, but likely served some entertaining purpose – exactly what does she not specify. Building upon Bator’s study, this paper will dig further into the question, what is the Liber Cure Cocorum? Although I will explore the various theories of the Liber’s origin, I will argue that the author of the Liber, The Booke of Curtassye, and the compiler of MS Sloane 1986 sought to capture the culinary rules and rituals of wealthy households in one text. I will particularly emphasise the possibility that The Booke of Curtassye and Liber was produced for, or by, aspiring members of society that wished to understand and imitate the rules and rituals of wealthy households, or was compiled by a member of a large household to educate its members and preserve their culinary culture. Analysis of the relationship between the rhyming verse and the recipes is central to this conclusion, however I will go a step further and consider its form within the context of household and didactic literature more generally to reveal how this rhyme reinforces the authority and legacy of the culinary rules. All these findings lead to one conclusion: the Liber not only reflects a well-established culinary culture with complex rules and rituals worth recording in written form, but its binding alongside behaviour texts and the use of the same verse style sets culinary recipes firmly alongside texts that defined the elite culture of late medieval England.