Cocatrice and Lampray Hay is our title for this edition of the Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS F 291 which contains 99 recipes written in English (showing signs, the experts claim, of East Anglian provenance). The recipes are remarkable for their close attention to detail and much greater information about quantities of ingredients than similar collections from earlier centuries. They include dishes such as the famous cocatrice or basilisk, which is a combination of pig and chicken constructed as a fabulous beast, to the more mundane, but more cookable, blancmanges, stewed oysters, croustades, pies, venison, beef and chicken dishes. The edition gives the original text, a translation into modern English, a full commentary and notes for the modern cook who wishes to interpret each dish in his or her own kitchen.The volume closes with a glossary or recipe titles and a concordance of this collection supplementary to the editor’s fuller and earlier concordance of all medieval English recipes, allowing the reader to place this group in some form of culinary context.

Constance B. Hieatt