Food History

I asked Cindy Renfrow if I could interview her for my interview series and I emailed her some questions. Instead of normal interview answers, she sent me a letter for you, so I’m going to give you her thoughts without even a proper introduction. Explaining who she is would be gilding the lily, anyhow, since she explains things so beautifully clearly. Needless to say, I own one of her books.

“Hello!

My name is Cindy Renfrow and I’m the author of A Sip Through Time, A Collection of Old Brewing Recipes, and Take a Thousand Eggs or More, a Collection of 15th century recipes. I’ve always been interested in foods of other cultures, ever since I was a small child. I learned to cook when I was about five, and haven’t stopped since! My interest in food history started in grade school when I read a recipe book that focused on American Colonial history. I remember it had pictures of all the nifty gadgets they used to cook their food. Salamanders and beehive ovens, oh my! I was hooked! How disappointed I was that we only had a gas range at home and Mom & Dad wouldn’t let me dig a clam pit in the back yard!

My mother was NYC born and raised, but her mother was a Tarheel from North Carolina. This meant we had grits and scrapple and (god help me!) Brunswick Stew with okra as often as we had eggs and bagels and spaghetti! My father hailed from Austria, but spurned his native dishes. He thought a successful American businessman such as himself should have steak every night for dinner! They thought me strange. Nevertheless, they both encouraged my culinary ‘experiments’, and gamely ate my mistakes.

It was after college in 1984 that I found an old copy of Thomas Austin’s Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books (Harleian MSS 279 and 4016, with extracts from Ashmole MS 1439, Laud MS 553, and Douce MS 55). Being the wife of a starving graduate student at the time, I had no money to copy the out of print library book. So I began transcribing the recipes from it into my husbands brand new 512K Macintosh computer. I justified this as an exercise in using the blasted thing! Pretty soon I’d done too much to waste it all, plus we were involved with the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group of medieval re-enactors that was seriously in need of *authentic* and tasty medieval recipes. So, over the course of the next few years I wrote Take a Thousand Eggs or More. I tested about a hundred of the recipes from Austin’s book, and transcribed and translated all the rest. And I must say in all honesty, most of the recipes are really quite good!

One transcontinental move and two babies later, I was going out of my mind in suburban Pennsylvania when I decided to save my sanity by writing a new book! Hence, A Sip Through Time. Recipes in A Sip Through Time were found in every old source I could get my hands on. My husband and I had been hobbyist mead-makers for awhile, and I’d dabbled a bit in homemade wines, but that was the extent of my experience. However, I’d gotten my degree in Botany, so I was fascinated by the diversity of herbs called for in many of the old recipes I found. That’s why A Sip Through Time has such an extensive glossary of herbs.

It was the difficulty I experienced in finding source material for A Sip Through Time that eventually led me to post a number of old cookbooks on the web – Liber Cure Cocorum (c. 1430), Forme of Curye (c. 1390), and Le Menagier de Paris (1395), for example. This effort led me and several friends to begin the Online Culinary History Library project, which has since drawn volunteers from all over the world. The purpose of this scholarly project is to make old culinary texts available online in facsimile, transcription and translation to make it easier for researchers of all ages and experience levels to find the source material they need. We welcome volunteers.

My website is: http://www.thousandeggs.com where you’ll find excerpts from my books as well as my favorite family recipes and much much more. Please drop by for a visit!

Regards,

Cindy Renfrow”

food history, Cindy Renfrow, thousand eggs, Medieval food