User:Mcapdevila/Llibre de Sent Soví

The Book of all kinds of food stews, better known as the Book of Saint Soví ( 1324 ) is a medieval recipe book by an anonymous author written in Catalan. It is one of the oldest manuscripts in Europe, the first known recipe book of Catalan cuisine  and one of the oldest European recipes written in a language other than Latin. It contains more than two hundred recipes. He was one of the most influential recipe books in Europe and some of his recipes were copied in the  fifteenth century in two Italian recipes, the Libro di arte coquinaria , which considers Catalan chefs to be the best in the world,  and Platina de honesta voluptate et valetudine , and of these recipes copied to those of the rest of the continent. You can also find some of his recipes in another Catalan cookbook, the Llibre d'aparellar de menjar. It was first published in 1952 by Lluís Faraudo i de Saint-Germain,  editor of many other medieval texts. In 1979 in Rudolf Grewe published book rebuilding two old manuscripts found in Valencia and Barcelona. Currently, a manuscript is preserved at the University of Valencia and another at the CRAI  of the University of Barcelona which can be consulted in digital version on the portal of the Digital Heritage Library of the University of Barcelona (BiPaDi ).

Two different manuscripts
There are two manuscript copies known as the Llibre de Sent Soví, one in Valencia (written in 1313) and another in Barcelona (carried out in the  15th century ), but recent research led by Lluís Cifuentes has established that the Valencian text, shorter but older, is what would really correspond to the original of the Book of St. Sovereign , while the text found and preserved in Barcelona, ​​much longer, would be a different work, which has been agreed to identify as a Book of all kinds of food stews , which would have included the content of the Valencian text in a text process made according to different coupling systems. This process was very common in texts of similar content at the same time.

Content
The book is a collection of two hundred and twenty Catalan recipes  of the time, belonging to Mediterranean cuisine and with a clear Roman and Arabic influence. There are recipes for soups, roasts , desserts , etc. but the more than fifty fish recipes , fresh or salted, stand out. There are also recipes with crustaceans ( lobster, lobster , prawn , crab and sea ​​ox )  and cephalopods ( squid ,cuttlefish and octopus ),  but no recipe using shells. It already uses canned salted tuna, anchovies in oil and the pickling technique. Pickles were introduced to Catalan-speaking countries by the Arabs, who made them with meat and very rarely with fish. At Sent Soví there are already three pickled recipes,  also with fish (one with sardines). There are no recipes for freshwater fish, although omelettes are known to be caught and salted. Nor does it mention herring  or fish of non-Mediterranean origin, such as salmon.

As meats we find pork, mutton , goat , rabbit and beef. The pork was already made into bacon, ham and sausages. Also eggs and poultry, such as chicken, hen , hood , duck , pigeon , goose and peacock. The game present in the Sent Soví are wild rabbits and hares, wild boars , deer , bears , partridges , pheasants ,quails , wild pigeons, cranes , tudons and thrushes. Contains recipes for chicken broth for "delicate man" and "comfort".

There are only eleven recipes where the milk is listed, on two occasions it does not mention which animal it comes from and on all the others it specifies that it is goat. In no case does it relate it to seafood, as half of the recipes used are for vegetable dishes, in two cases meat and the rest in sweet preparations that we would now consider desserts. In contrast, almond milk is included in many more recipes and has a much larger presence in the recipe. Explain how to make curd. Fresh or dried cheese was common and used in recipes.

Many recipes use onion and almond as a base for the sauces used in the dish, as is still the case today. The stir-fry (in medieval Catalan, soengua ) is still made without tomato. The sting is considered very important, especially in sauces, although the name sting we use currently is not used in the book,  there is no name, but itchy almond bread and other ingredients in water or broth, in some titles of sauces, for example, specifies "ab let of almonds" which later in the recipe we see that it is a bite identical to the current ones.

As recipes that have remained the same to this day, there are also panadas and fritters. In particular there is a recipe for sweet cheese fritters that are still made in Menorca, where they are typical for All Saints. We find white food, flaó , etc.

The taste for the mixture of sweet and savory in the dishes is already very clear in this recipe, which for some is a clear influence of Arabic cuisine. There are also recipes with products such as asparagus, chickpeas or eggplant , which also appears in some peninsular recipes of the time but not yet in Occitania or northern France  (not eaten the same products in the south as in the north of France). There are also recipes for green beans.

In addition, there are also many recipes that use bitter orange juice (sweet orange came from the hand of the Portuguese in the XV-XVI centuries), cider or rose water.

The saffron is the species most commonly used in these two books, as it was in contemporary Italian recipes, but it ranks third in Languedoc -although it was widely used, but with many more species that were used very well, two of them more- and less relevant places in other European cuisines. It should be clarified that saffron was the only spice not imported into the Catalan Countries. The second most used spice, in 12.8% of recipes, in the Book of St. Sovereign, is the black pepper. These two species are still widely used, while the third, ginger (11.6%), which was very fashionable throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, it is practically not used in Catalan cuisine today. The nutmeg is only present in a recipe for pea sauce, bittersweet and with herbs, which was used to accompany birds such as peacock, capon or pheasant. The cinnamon powder used to cover and decorate all kinds of sweet and savory preparations.

Highlights include the use of the fireplace as a firing system and the use of mortar.

A culinary photographer (Martí Sans) who has tried to make a reproduction of the dishes in the book with a minimal adaptation to the current ingredients so that it is easy to visualize what the recipes would be like on the sentsovi.cat website.

Style
The wording is very clear and precise, enough to be able to prepare the proposed dishes. The dishes and ingredients agree with those mentioned in medieval Catalan literature. Some Northern Catalans find expressions that their grandparents still use,  although at least some of them, such as making soups (to cut thin slices of bread and wet them in soup), they are also used or were used until very recently in other places in southern Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, for example. It is written in Catalan, which at the time was the vulgar language, as opposed to the cult that was Latin. But also the way of speaking is popular and anecdotal.

Author
The author is unknown. However, Eliana Thibaut i Comalada thinks that it could be a northern Catalan, because she uses expressions that remind her of some that are used in this country and because the list of vegetables mentioned corresponds mainly to all the crops of the Riberal of northern Catalonia. In addition, due to his style and the cross-references with other books of his, such as La letra del monge golafre, he thinks that it could be specifically Francesc Eiximenis.

Comparison with the Book of the Coch
The Llibre del Coch is another famous Catalan recipe book, in this case printed, two centuries later. We know the author, it's Robert de Nola. The differences in the type of cuisine are minimal. It is known that Robert de Nola knew the Book of Sent Sovín and that he uses some elements and recipes. As an innovation, for example, he proposes sheep 's milk in addition to goat ' s milk in some recipes. As for species, the Book of St. Sovereign generally uses fewer species than the Book of the Pig. In the Llibre de Sent Soví there are only Catalan recipes while in the Llibre del Cochit also includes recipes from neighboring cultures such as Italy, France or Arab countries. Neither, although the Llibre del Coch was quickly translated into Spanish, Castilian recipes appear. In 1491 the Church decided that Catholics could already eat eggs and milk for Lent, but Robert de Nola is unaware of this, so these ingredients are absent from the Lenten recipes in both books (probably the first edition). of the Book of the Coch we know is a copy of a version prior to that date).  The style of the Book of Cochit is more literary. The Llibre de Sent Soví was not made public until well into the twentieth  century, while the Llibre del Coch was quickly, in the words of Josep Pla , "a true best seller ", translated into several languages ​​and was "the cookbook of the Spain of the Renaissance ."

Modern editions

 * 1952 : the care of Lluís Faraudo de Saint-Germain.
 * 1979 : curated by Rudolf Grewe (Catalan).
 * 2003 : curated by Joan Santanach (Catalan).
 * 2006 : edited by Joan Santanach (Catalan).
 * 2007 : translation by Manel Zabala (Spanish).
 * 2008 : curated by Joan Santanach (English).
 * 2013 : curated by Patrick Gifreu (French).