The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery

Monica, Illadore and Cooks Source
Some of you may be coming from links related to Illadore/Monica Gaudio/Cooks Source. (If you aren't and are interested, try: Illadore's Blog or this Rant from Edrants.com or google "Monica Gaudio copyright", enjoy.) I've got my take on that up now at Aspiring Luddite. The short form is this.

On October 22, I presented a paper at the Columbia Graduate Student Medieval Conference entitled, "Medieval Food Porn: Forme of Cury and Du fait de cuisine. " Maybe twenty people heard the paper. One was a friend and colleague who came back from the Berkshires with an article from, yes, Cooks Source that mentioned Forme of Cury. (This is the now famous Tale of Two Tarts.) My friend thought it was funny that she had never heard of Forme of Cury before Friday and then ran into it again on Saturday. I thought the article and byline looked familiar.

I poked around a bit and realized that it was familiar, so I sent an email to Monica, the author, outlining the above and then saying:

 So my questions are ..

 did you know your article was being used in, umm, "Cooks Source?"
 If not, you should beat them up for copyright violation.

 If so, I'd be interested in hearing how you marketed the article
 since I'm always looking for ways to make a bit of spare cash
 from writing ...
The rest, as they say, is history.
Time from my paper to the internet tsunami swamping Cooks Source: 13 days.
Bizarre coincidences leading to the storm: at least 3, just from the bits above.

Hopefully you want some more medieval cookery, since that's mainly what this site is. Enjoy.
Jeff Berry


Jeff Berry/ Alexandre Lerot d'Avigné / nexus@panix.com / Last Update 20 April 2011