Medieval cuisine
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read, and working texts have a low survival rate. The recipes were often brief and did not give precise quantities. Cooking times and temperatures were seldom specified since accurate portable clocks were not available and since all cooking was done with fire. At best, cooking times could be specified as the time it took to say a certain number of prayers or how long it took to walk around a certain field. Professional cooks were taught their trade through apprenticeship and practical training, working their way up in the highly defined kitchen hierarchy. A medieval cook employed in a large household would most likely have been able to plan and produce a meal without the help of recipes or written instruction. Due to the generally good condition of surviving manuscripts it has been proposed by the food historian Terence Scully that they were records of household practices intended for the wealthy and literate master of a household, such as the Ménagier de Paris from the late 14th century. Over 70 collections of medieval
recipes survive today, written in several major European languages. The repertory of housekeeping instructions laid down by manuscripts like the Ménagier de Paris also include many details of overseeing correct preparations in the kitchen. Towards the onset of the early modern period, in 1474, the Vatican librarian Bartolomeo Platina wrote the De honesta voluptate et valetudine ("On honourable pleasure and health") and the physician Iodocus Willich edited Apicius in Zurich in 1563. High-status exotic spices and rarities like ginger, pepper, cloves, sesame, citron leaves and "onions of Escalon" all appear in an eighth-century list of spices that the Carolingian cook should have at hand written by Vinidarius, whose excerpts of Apicius survive in one eighth century uncial manuscript. Vinidarius' own dates may not be much earlier.