Page "Cookbook" Paragraph 6

After a long interval, the first recipe books to be compiled in Europe since Late Antiquity started to appear in the late thirteenth century.

About a hundred are known to have survived, some fragmentary, from the age before printing.

The earliest genuinely medieval recipes have been found in a Danish manuscript dating from around 1300, which in turn are copies of older texts that date back to the early 13th century or perhaps earlier.

Low and High German manuscripts are among the most numerous.

Among them is Daz buch von guter spise (" The Book of Good Food ") written c. 1350 in Würzberg and Kuchenmeysterey (" Kitchen Mastery "), the first printed German cook book from 1485.

Two French collections are probably the most famous: Le Viandier (" The Provisioner ") was compiled in the late 14th century by Guillaume Tirel, master chef for two French kings ; and Le Menagier de Paris (" The Householder of Paris "), a household book written by an anonymous middle class Parisian in the 1390s.

From Southern Europe there is the 14th century Catalan manuscript Llibre de Sent Soví (" The Book of Saint Sophia ") and several Italian collections, notably the Venetian mid-14th century Libro per Cuoco, with its 135 recipes alphabetically arranged.

The printed De honesta voluptate (" On honourable pleasure "), first published in 1475, is one of the first cookbooks based on Renaissance ideals, and, though it is as much a series of moral essays as a cookbook, has been described as " the anthology that closed the book on medieval Italian cooking ".

Recipes originating in England include the earliest recorded recipe for ravioli ( 1390s ) and Forme of Cury, a late 14th century manuscript written by chefs of Richard II of England.