The Olde Cookery Book:About

From The Olde Cookery Book

Once upon a time (in the previous millenium) there was a moderately successful site called "The Olde Cookery Book". That site specialized in pre-1900 cookery and brewing recipes. This site will continue where the old one left off. Building this site had much to with a lot of people at the end of last century. Maybe you know who you were, but if not, you're here.

The purpose of The Olde Cookery Book is

to rescue our familly recipes for posterity
to provide the larger community with easy and uniform access to historical cooking and brewing recipes
to provide the means of easy retrival and collaboration on historical cooking and brewing
and to build on that task to provide a community based service for all those who wish to try historical cooking and brewing.
given time and resources, in the future provide related services like private adds, shopping facilities etc

Welcome brave explorer!

The Olde Cookery Book is dedicated to collecting pre-1900 cooking & home brewing recipes. This way old time cooking will be

remembered and future generations of culinary interested people will have easy access to the recipes. In time I hope there will also be a library of articles on historic cooking and brewery on the site. A few words on the content of the recipes may be in order. Most of the recipes presented here are transcripts of the original recipes. This means that ingredients may be rare or exotic. Some ingredients may even be harmful if handled incorrectly. Please always consult the associated text for flagged ingredients - and the disclaimer page.

I do not take responsibility for any unfortunate accidents caused by incorrect handling of ingredients.

So, what will this be all about

As you may have guessed you'll find cookery and brewing recipes here. Old ones. Even very, very old ones - like Roman time old. The main period for the Olde Cookery Book is c 1500-1900 mainly because the user community for medieval re-enactment (including doing the recipes) is very well advanced, with lots of excellent sites and lots of work put into it. And much of it is copyrighted by translators and transcribers anyway. The Olde Cookery Book was once (it existed on the web back in the 1990s) established to save my grandmother's (on my fathers side) cookery book recipes to posterity. It was eventually expanded with related information on all kinds of stuff. And added to with my family cookbook (on my mothers side). But that isn't all and much more was added and can be found here as well. You will also find menus to organize your moderate 11 meal family dinners in the correct manner. Or get the correct content for your medieval feasts or whatever you like to use the menus for.

But what is a wiki and why are you using it?

There are several collections and "reprints" of old historic cookbooks or collections. But they "all" have one

large problem, they are not interactive or collaborative. Some even actively discourages collaboration or sharing of information. A wiki, on the other hand, is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. (from Wikipedia, which is based on the same wiki backend as this site). So the reason for using a wiki rather than a standard web site with a recipe database (I've thought of that too) is to make tOCB more community accessible. "Communities" are a thing happening more after the 1990s. Visitors will be able to add comments to recipes, providing feed back on the originals or provide modern adaptions from the avant-garde of experimental historical cooking (and brewing).

There is another point in using Mediawiki as the publishing media. That is, we are running this thing on Semantic Mediawiki. This means that there will be unique possibilities in searching the recipe collection in a number of way as well as unique collaboration possibilities, not provided by other (historical) food sites on the net.

In the future we will hopefully be able to provide some community resources for visitors. Like advertising space for period caterers and so on. We hope to come up with other ideas when time permits.

Contact us

You can contact the Olde Cookery Book through the webmaster address [martin - at -theoldecookerybook - dot - com]

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