Abstract

The earliest English culinary recipes occur in two Anglo-Norman manuscripts, both in the British Library: Additional 32085 and Royal 12.C.xii. A transcription of the latter, with a few footnotes citing recipes in the former, was published by Paul Meyer in 1893 . Meyer proposed to publish a full version of the earlier manuscript at a later date, but he never did. No new Anglo-Norman collections have turned up since that time, although we have searched in a great number of libraries and their catalogues. In view of recent interest in medieval recipes and advances in our understanding of their terms, it seems time to publish the Additional manuscript, and with it a corrected and fully annotated transcript of the Royal manuscript, although our reading differs from Meyer's only occasionally