More curiosities

DICTIONARY   OF   FABULOUS BEASTS

 
Mythical creatures drawn largely from medieval travellers’ tales, but encompassing civilisations from the Sumerians to the Wild West.
 
A dictionary? No, this is really an astonishing ark filled with beasts from a fabulous zoo far more varied and entertaining than anything from ordinary natural history. From Abaia and Abath to Ziz and Zu, from the microscopic Gigelorum that nests in a mite’s ear to the giant serpent Jormungandor who encircles the whole globe, there are beasts from every corner of man’s imagination: the light-hearted Fearsome Critters of lumberjack tales find a place alongside the Sirrush of Babylon and the Winged Bulls of Assyria. Some of the fabulous beasts turn out to be real creatures in disguise – a Cameleopard is a kind of glamourised giraffe -while others are almost, but not quite, human. Among the six hundred entries are some which are full-scale essays in their own right, as on Phoenix or Giants; and just in case it seems as though the authors dreamt up the entire book, there is a detailed list of books for the would-be hunter in this mythical jungle.
 

COOKING AND RECIPES FROM ROME TO THE RENAISSANCE

I feel that this deserves a mention somewhere. It was a bit of an oddity, and I honestly can’t remember how or why I got interested in medieval cookery.

When it was commissioned, there was very little recent work on medieval and early modern cookery, though Apicius’ Roman cookery book was readily available. I was late with the manuscript, and when it finally got to the stage of being reviewed, there was a flood of new books on the subject – I seem to remember a TLS review covering half a dozen or more. Still, it did attract some attention: Anglia, our local tv station, asked me to do a studio interview and demonstration, and BBC Look East came and filmed at home. Unfortunately, both items were screened at the same time, which led to some lively arguments the next day among friends who had watched  as to where I had been in the film they saw.

A mass of more recent publications have made this obsolete – I only wish I had had Terence Scully’s books and editions before I started! Among them were The Viandier of Taillevent, Master Chiquart’s ‘On Cookery’, and notably The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages.