King Richard II's Cookbook Goes Online

by stevesmys | June 19, 2009 at 10:46 am

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A 14th-century book of recipes compiled by his master cooks will be put online for the first time. The recipes will provide modern-day chefs fresh insight into Middle Age delicacies.

Forme of Cury, which was written in 1390 in Middle English, details more than 200 recipes that were cooked in the royal household, including blank mang (a sweet dish of meat, milk, sugar and almonds) and mortrews (ground and spiced pork).

The book is one of 40 rare manuscripts beings digitally photographed and put online by he John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester, to be completed by "late 2009," the Telegraph reports.

Jan Wilkinson, the director of the John Rylands library, described the library's manuscripts as "a research resource of immense significance".

"Yet the manuscripts are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies. Digitisation will make them available to everyone," she said.

Other manuscripts inlude of the earliest editions of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgae's poems Troy Book and Fall of Princes, and a 500-year-old translation of the Bible into Middle English.

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