godecookery.com is the first result if I type "translation of the boke of gode cokery" into google. What were you hoping for? That it would be a top result for the query "good recipes"? That seems unreasonable.
From what I can tell, this is a set of recipes from other medieval cook books, not a translation of “the Boke of Cokery”. In a random sample of ten recipes, each gave a different source and none was Boke of Cokery. Still a great website!
Old books are really nice. I've got one from 1575 about plants, written in old french. It looks, feels and smells "hundreds of years old".
Some old books like the one about cooking in TFA are ultra rare but others were printed in gigantic numbers and many copies persists to this day, so they can be fetched at relatively low prices (sometimes for a few hundreds bucks if you're lucky).
Here's the one I have (there are complete PDF scans of that book on the net as it's a really common one):
To a quart of red wine, add an ounce of cinnamon and half an ounce of ginger; a quarter of an ounce of grains of paradise and long pepper, and half a pound of sugar. Bruise all this, not too small, and strain the wine through a cloth bag.
Geezus, half a pound of sugar? Sounds like an early recipe for coca-cola.
It'd be interesting to have a reference for the kind of wine mentioned in the book: wines in antiquity were much thicker and sweeter than modern wines, and were usually diluted with water and flavored with herbs before drinking.
A lifetime ago, before the iphone, a friend and I wrote a bartender guide for the Danger Hiptop (aka Tmobile Sidekick). I hand-curated and rewrote most of the drink catalog, and that's where I learned about the Calimocho.
The app was amazing. Type a few letters of some ingredients in the search bar and it filtered the list of drinks down to a subset, eg "ora bour". It even showed you what kind of glass to drink it in. Unfortunately Tmobile balked at having a 21+ app in their app store and it was never released to the public.
I honestly didn't know it had a name, I mean I'm not surprised, but its existence is something I acquired by absorption over time to the extent that I really don't know where it came from. Strong candidate is a German roommate forever ago, but I'm certain we never actually had them.
It's sad that it's virtually impossible to find medieval food like this. All "medieval" restaurants (even in Europe) I know of either serve modern food in old digs, or random barbecue as a sideshow to jousting knights and whatnot.
Yes, those are perfect examples of the kind of fake medieval I was talking about. For example, both feature roast chicken on the menu, but chicken was rarely if even eaten before the 1900s. The few that were for laying eggs, meaning they were butchered only after many years and were thus a far cry from the plump KFC type chickens we see today. (Which is also why the most famous French chicken/rooster dish, coq au vin, is designed to tenderize and extract all calories from a tough old rooster.)
At least the first has a couple of authentic-ish medieval desserts though.
The font is Blackletter, which was widely used in Europe, but specifically Germany kept using it until 1941, when Nazis abolished its use. But since Germans used the font, and nazis were German, people think that the font is bad, and should not be used. Similarly, since nazis tended to be clean-shaven and not grow beards, it is well-known that every right-thinking man today must grow a beard to avoid signalling their nazi sympathies.
Interesting factoids about military facial hair to go with your joke:
Moustaches were mandatory in the British army (and shaving them off a punishable offence) for about sixty years, up until the middle of the First World War, where the rule fell out of favour in no small part because too many of the new recruits were too young for anything more than peach fuzz.
The Victorian trend for really big bushy beards emerged in part out of mass public admiration for British soldiers returning from the Crimean War, who had grown long beards to help cope with the extreme cold over a very long campaign, after Queen Victoria noted them with some admiration. Though it probably did land at a time where shaving was somewhat out of fashion.
Mmm...yeah so someone who learned German as a second language and knew a lot about the culture and history explained the toothbrush mustache, as worn by Adolf Hitler.
"So it was because German elite airmen needed oxygen at the altitude at which they flew, within the airplane. I suppose because the cabin was not pressurized. They had to be able to get a good tight fit on the masks, so the only facial hair they could have was a toothbrush mustache, because that didn't make the mask leak.
So in solidarity with elite airmen, to show they were just as masculine despite having so little facial hair, Hitler wore that mustache always."
Which doesn't even make sense, given it was abolished by Nazi Germany "when Hitler's distaste for the supposedly "Jewish-influenced" script saw it officially discontinued"
Just to be clear, people being stupid about fonts is real, but my analogy about beards is meant to be an obvious joke to highlight the stupidity of such reasonings. I am not currently aware about anyone associating clean-shavenness with nazis, although it might only be a matter of time.
Go learn a bit more history - the use of Blackletter/Fraktur was banned by the National Socialist government because it was "Jewish". Earlier Nazi posters and publications used it, but so did the Social Democrats (SPD - Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and even Communists (KPD - Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands) - here are loads of examples, provided by a Social Democratic historical society (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung)[0], and a very specific one - the edition of the "Vorwärts" announcing the abdication of the Kaiser (something the SPD was very excited about)[1].
Most older German books and newspapers, regardless of point of view, were typeset in Fraktur.
There's a whole site devoted to Weimar Era (1919-1933) era political campaign posters[3], and just about every party, left, right and center, used Fraktur on occasion - and to be fair to the parent commenter, repeatedly by a certain someone complaining about being cancelled[4][5][6]
