Cutlery holders

I have been working on many things, but don’t seem to finish most. This week I forced myself to finish a project I started last year: a pair of cutlery holders for my baron and baroness. They are nothing fancy, but they are done.

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Paint Night

The painting group got together via Zoom for another evening of portrait painting with Eoin as our model this time. It don’t hate the results. I might even continue working on it.

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More Largesse

The pennanular brooches aren’t quite finished in this picture.

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It is the season to harvest grapes

September is the traditional time to harvest grapes, at least if one judges by the illuminations in medieval prayer books and books of hours. The image below is from the Psalter of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1185) – KB 76 F 13, folium 009v, in the National Library of the Netherlands.

This was my harvest today: 12 1/2 pounds of Concord grapes. I am quite pleased with what I managed to get from the little trellis in my front yard.

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New Cookbook – Meister Hanns Von Wirtenberg Koch

A fellow named Volker Bach on SCA cooks recently introduced me to a new cookbook. This is his description:

“One of the most extensive and interesting recipe collections in German is a manuscript dated 1460 and ascribed to one Meister Hans, cook at the Wurttemberg court. It was often treated as a solitary, the work of a single cook, but there are too many parallels with contemporary manuscripts from Southern Germany to make this plausible. The recipes are an eclectic mix, many terse and simple, others detailed and sprinkled with anecdotes. I will try to bring back my previous tradition and translate one every evening. This, too, might be worth doing in its entirety, and maybe one day, there will be time and a publisher.”

Volker has been publishing translations in English every few days, and I got interested in trying to track down a copy of the original text for myself. Yesterday, it arrived! It took some work and navigating German book dealer sites, but it turns out there is a German specialist in antiquarian cookbooks based in Berlin, and he had a copy available of a facsimile, translation (into modern German), glossary and cultural-historical commentary by Trude Ehlert, published in 1996 by Tupperware Frankfurt. I can’t wait to dig in!

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