Book Review With An Offer: A Medieval Cookery Primer

I recently acquired a copy of the following booklet, a photograph of which is shown to the right of this post:

Berry, Jeff.  A Medieval Cookery Primer:  A Programmed Approach.  Compleat Anachronist, Issue No. 188, Second Quarter 2020.  ISSN:  2375-5482. [55 pages]

This little book isn't a primer.  Nor does it contain facts about medieval cuisine, except incidentally.  Instead, it's a suggested course of readings and activities intended to enable the reader to teach himself or herself the art of medieval cookery. 

Mr. Berry begins with the assumption that to understand historical cookery, one must first understand the cookery of one's own time, the better to appreciate differences between one's own cookery and that of earlier periods. As a consequence, his first chapters begin with information on typical cooking techniques of the period and the equipment used to achieve them.  The chapters are:  Modern Cookery (primarily 20th century); Early Modern Cookery (e.g., 17th and 18th centuries) and Medieval Cookery (the 14th and 15th centuries)  In each chapter, he selects at least one popular period cookbook and discusses several recipes therein, noting features in each that differ from modern recipes.  

In the final chapter, "Perils and Pitfalls", Mr. Berry deals with problems the reader likely will encounter in attempting to recreate a historical recipe in a 21st century kitchen.  For example, the simple act of substituting one food item for another in a recipe can be problematic, if the item is an extinct plant or an herb no longer deemed safe for human consumption.  Use of old texts that have been replicated using modern optical character recognition (OCR) devices can introduce their own types of errors.  

Finally, (as the title of my post indicates), if any of my readers is interested in obtaining a copy of this little book, I have a copy I would like to sell.  For reasons that are not interesting to describe, I ended up with two copies of Berry's little tome.  I am willing to sell my extra copy for what I paid for it ($7.50 USD), plus the cost of shipping.  If you are in the United States, I can send the book at "media mail" or book rate, which is extremely cheap.  If you're outside the United States, e-mail me at cathy at thyrsus dot com and we can discuss who will bear shipping costs and what type of shipping method is appropriate.